with us that much longer. Well, anyone who thinks that checks are going away is dead wrong. People are always asking me, "When are we going to see the paperless society?" I tell them, "When you see the paperless toilet. No time soon."
I'll be long dead, even if I live to a ripe old age, before checks will ever disappear. The amount of checks we write is growing at a rate of more than a billion checks a year. So they're not even declining in use. They're growing. I remember fifteen years ago, when we were writing 40 billion checks a year, people said it would never reach 50 billion, and now we're at almost 70 billion.
People happen to like checks. They're familiar. Many consumers will say, "I like this check. It has some float to it. I like that much better than when the bank immediately goes into my checking account and takes the money out. I also like the idea that I can get the check back and see who I wrote it to and have a record of it." And we have a very large generation that is not comfortable with smart cards and electronics. They're leery of new ways of payments, and they don't fully grasp them.
Electronic banking is still much more of an unknown frontier. And there's no forgetting the billions of dollars that banks have invested in electronic readers, sorters, and other check processing equipment. We're not going to just scrap it and plow money into home banking. There are banks out there pushing electronics, but there are a lot of other banks that would just as soon stay with checks.
So if we're going to continue to use checks, you had better learn how to protect yourself. After all, awareness is 99 percent of solving the problem. The moment you accept the fact that fraud and forgery are so easy to accomplish, that's the moment you've taken the first step toward combating it.
Chapter 3
[COUNTERFEIT CAPERS]
I once was interviewed about fraudulent documents by Sam Donaldson of ABC television. During the interview, I dug into my briefcase for a moment and pulled out a piece of paper. I handed it to him and said, "By the way, have you seen this letter?" He studied the sheet of paper and his eyes got very wide. "Wait a minute, where did you get this?" he said.
It was a letter of reference on ABC stationery, extolling the many virtues of Frank Abagnale. It was signed by Sam Donaldson.
"You sent me a letter two days ago confirming our interview," I said. "I scanned the ABC letterhead into my computer. I matched the paper - it was just standard linen paper - with paper I bought at the local stationery store. Then I wrote the new text and printed it out."
"But what about my signature?" he asked.
"I scanned that off your letter, too," I said.
That was just a fun thing I did to illustrate a point. But I'm far from the only one doing it. We're literally awash in phony documents, and I'm not talking simply about those fake IDs that teenagers buy in Times Square to allow them to purchase beer and gain entrance to clubs. Counterfeit documents of every imaginable kind have proliferated: birth certificates, death certificates, Social Security cards, driver's licenses, store receipts, medical prescriptions, product labels, traveler's checks, event tickets, amusement park passes, coupons, car titles, green cards, diplomas, college transcripts, passports, voter identification cards, and, the most counterfeited piece of paper of all, money itself. Almost anyone can professionally forge or counterfeit a wide variety of documents, day after day, for an investment of just a few thousand dollars.
Because so much fake paper is floating around, I caution managers that when they hire someone for a sensitive position, it's more than credentials that they need. They have to make phone calls. They have to write letters. Don't trust a piece of paper, because anything can be replicated. Just ask Sam Donaldson.
It's gotten so bad, even the FBI is changing its credentials. Since the days of Hoover, they've had the same ones - reused. When an FBI agent retires, he turns in his credentials and a new agent receives them. Now the agency is redoing them with holograms to make them harder to counterfeit.
A CHAIN IS ONLY AS STRONG
AS ITS WEAKEST LINK
The real travesty here is the chain-link effect of counterfeit documents. What happens is criminals use counterfeit papers as "breeder" documents. A breeder document is a