There are about 1000x the cons to run now, though, most of them using the identifiable information that is already on the internet. Just look at the conflation of some combination of birthday and ssn as “proof” of id in spite of millions of employees having easy access to the information. Christ, for some reason Comcast has my ssn despite having zero legitimate use for it. Add automated phishing and you have a cash printer.

Sure you can. Checks were harder to get rid of 50 years ago.

On the street we have a legit smalltime money-laundering industry in terms of retail gift card availability. A real common racket these days is targeting immigrant business people pretending to be the utility company/IRS/etc and demand gift cards to settle some matter, for example. There is a huge underground economy out there.

Off the street, the complete lack of security controls around ACH is an even more extreme risk. Just rob a mailbox and steal account info from checks.

It shocked me that Bank of America would deliver box of checks that were just dumped on my porch. I found them 3 days after I got email they were delivered in the bush next to front door. I remember years ago I had to be present home and DHL came and required ID/signature to receive those. That was 2014. In 2020 I guess they saving extra money. Fun fact - there is over $8MM in the corp account that these checks could cover.

It would seem to worth looking into positive pay --- the idea is you send a daily file with the checks written, and BofA will automatically clear anything in the file, and exceptions would be sent to you for review (or maybe just rejected). It's a common feature for corporate accounts, because it eliminates check modification fraud.

FWIW a number of years ago Wells Fargo was willing to have my refill checks sent to the bank branch where I could pick them up.

Don't know if banks do that sort of thing anymore. If not, then WTF is the point of "branches"? If they don't provide any value added then they are just expensive real estate and warm bodies.

Of course in hindsight in Wells Fargo's case we know that those warm bodies were expected to push all sorts of ancillary products on customers (they never did that with me).

The ACH issue is why Donald Knuth no longer sends out his famous checks to people who find errors in his books but now uses mock check-like certificates. Typically people didn't cash the checks but put them on display for bragging rights, and apparently somebody used the numbers to scam his bank account.

Yea exactly. Nowadays with so many things being digital, some things are harder to con. For example, a check can now be verified within minutes through digital machines. Frank wouldn't have to worry about that 50 years ago.

Con men/women are everywhere in every era. They just change their mediums and methods according to the times.

These days you leave a much longer trail, though. You can't just walk away from your attempted con. It could come back to bite you at any time.

Law enforcement has nearly no interest or ability to prosecute and punish fraud though, especially if you wrap it in an LLC. As long as you don't mind getting caught, the punishments are merely a cost of doing business.

Today provides tons of forensic evidence. So I don't really think it's any easier, at least for anyone living in a western country.

On an individual victim, maybe. But today, you can scale your efforts much more easily.