Wealth Management Clients Should Be Careful with Their Checks

Frank Abagnale Jr. ("Catch Me If You Can") in a WSJ interview:

Think about this: You go into a convenience store today and write a check for $9. You have to hand the clerk the check with your name and address, phone number, your bank’s name and address, your account number at your bank, the routing number into your account. That’s your wiring instructions. Your signature that’s on the signature card at your bank. And then the clerk has written down your state driver’s license number on the front and your date of birth. You don’t get the check back. You can get an image of the check; the physical check goes to [the store’s] warehouse, where eventually, six months from now, they will destroy it. 

In the meantime, anyone who would see the face of that check—from the clerk who took it at the counter to the one that made the night deposit—could draft on your bank account tomorrow, would have all the drafting instructions. Or they could go online [and order checks] that look exactly like your checks, but put their name on it and put your account number on it. So every check they write gets debited against your account. It’s so simple to do. 

It’s amazing to me that people are writing $9 checks from their wealth-management account, their private banking account, and giving them to some stranger in a store.