Could stealth printing techniques help to prevent cheque fraud?
Following a recent article in the Daventry Express, detailing how a postal worker helped to facilitate frauds with a total cost to banks of over £1 million we’ve been discussing whether stealth printing techniques could help to prevent similar crimes.
The difficulty of this particular fraudulent crime is that the issue is not with the cheques themselves, it is the fact that they are posted out in regular mail, and are easily identifiable. Certainly in the case featured in the Daventry Express’s article, the convicted party was a postal worker who had been caught stealing cheque books from the sorting depot where he worked. He was then selling the cheque books on, ironically generating minimal financial gain for himself in comparison to the final figure fraudulently obtained by those that he sold the cheque books to.
Usually the criminals obtaining the cheque books simply draw cash out or pay bills, the banks clear the cheques despite the fact that the signature does not match. It is very difficult for cheque printing to offer any assistance in reducing this type of crime, as the real issue is with the packaging & distribution of the cheque books, and the human interaction with the banks.
There is an argument to say that the use of stealth printing techniques for elements such as account name could help with cheque printing and the prevention of such cases of fraud, however this still relies on banks checking these details against stored information, which history tells us is unlikely.