DW said she's had 7 customers in the past 10 days come in saying they had checks stolen out of the mail. She says thieves are creating some type of sticky hands reaching thing where they can reach the stick in the blue box by the street, and the envelopes stick to it and then they just pull it out. It's really kind of scary. We don't even own checks anymore. Everything is digital, except for our church tithe. And we pay cash for that.
The crazy thing is in my dad's cases, it wasn't even checks being stolen from his mailbox. The bill still got paid but who knows? The 2nd time we don't know how someone got his routing/account numbers but the first time was before he needed care and was living independently. We knew he was a little forgetful but no one was calling it dementia yet. He could still refill his pill organizers and pay his bills, and go grocery shopping. Something popped up on his computer that told him he had a virus and to call some number and they'd fix it. They literally walked him through all the steps of scanning a check, which I'm certain he's never scanned anything before in his life, only printing from his computer or making copies.
They walked him through how to attach the image of the check to an email and he had just sent it when I walked in.
I grabbed the phone from him, called them some names using language that my father has
never heard me speak in my entire life, told them to get a real job, and because it's a landline, I had the pleasure of slamming the phone down to hang up on them. (Something young people who've only had wireless phones will never get to enjoy.)
I told him we need to have his checking account shut down for fraud. He insisted it was a computer repair company. By coincidence my niece, who now lives with him as his caretaker, called shortly after to say hi and check on him. I told her what happened and she talked to him and convinced him that it was a scammer. He only believed her because she was working at a bank at the time. Arrrrgh!!!
What a pain it was to re-establish his Social Security & pension direct deposits and Medicare supplement auto debit. I had to take a day off work to get it all done.
The 2nd time, I had been paying his bills but he still insisted on mailing checks but used a big blue box, not his own. I noticed a large payment being made to Capital One (over $9k) that was more than he had in his account and it was declined. They tried a smaller amount and was successful. So here we go again, going to the bank to report fraud, get a new account number, re-establish all of his automatic transactions.
Since then we got a joint account and I took over paying all his bills online. The fewer checks we write, the better. It's hard for him to comprehend, besides the dementia, that something he did so frequently all of his adult life is now something bad. Kind of like answering the phone when you don't recognize the number.
He especially liked to mail out bills from his mailbox because if you have outgoing mail, you flip the little flag up. He could look out the window and see that the flag was still up then he hadn't come yet or if it was down, he knew the mailman had come. On days with no outgoing mail, he'd check the box 5x.
One thing for sure, if they catch these evil people who do this stuff, they need to serve a long time in prison.
But even when I was working, I still paid in person. Town Hall is 5 minutes away, I can stop on my way to other errands. Usually no wait, longest line I ever waited in was 4 people, with 3 clerks working. So minimal at worst. I don’t like leaving big checks sitting in our mailbox to get picked up. Town Hall is a minute away from the post office, the wait at the post office is always longer than at town hall. I also prefer to know it’s paid, not sitting in a mailbox somewhere, get my receipt immediately & be able to put that right in next years tax file. We have a 2.3% fee for any credit or debit card. So I pay by check, although I have paid by credit card when I wanted points. I just did that in February with my new SW card. The small fee amount is going a long way towards the companion pass that I’ll earn next month & we’ll use until December 2027.
so yup i'm stocking up and will be freezing it. as the weather gets nicer herabouts i'm guessing the next big stock up opportunities will be of the bbq variety so I'll keep an eye on my supply of condiments.
