With a check in hand, a Coloradan is breathing a sigh of relief.
“Forty-six hundred dollars is a lot of money to me, to have lost,” Carol told CBS Colorado. For the purposes of this story, Carol asked her full name be kept private.
In April, Carol wrote a check to pay her property taxes and dropped it in a blue USPS Collection Box outside of a Lakewood post office. Weeks later, she learned that check never made it.
“It was deposited via phone mobile bank in New York state, and they had changed the name on the check,” Carol said. “They didn’t change the amount.”
Instead, the check had been washed and was made out to someone she had never heard and deposited electronically. Carol’s bank BMO has a digital banking guarantee that, if an unauthorized transaction meets certain terms and conditions, it will notify the bank of the fraud within two business days.
Carol didn’t know she’d been a victim of fraud until much later.