With all the protection and overprotection people put in to protecting themselves from identity theft and from people stealing their credit cards,
I find it a little disconcerting that I get a daily barrage of mail from my credit card companies that include 4-5 blank checks. Just fill them out to whomever and wait for the charge to show up on your credit card.
I get so many of these that I wouldn’t even notice if one was missing. All it would take is for one to get lost in the mail or someone to sneak one out of my mailbox and write themselves a check to whomever they wanted. By the time I get my statement I’m sure the check will already have cleared.
Anybody else freaked out by all these blank checks floating around out there connected directly to your CC accounts?
Can you request your CC company to stop sending these things?
Drives me insane. I can no longer just toss junk mail in the recycling bin, I have to open them and remove the checks for the shredder. The way they send these out seems to be a major risk to consumers.
What really gets me is that I deal with banks for a living. I speak with Risk and Compliance teams all the time. You would not believe the objections based upon risk of fraud that come from banks when dealing with the simpliest things. Yet they mail these damn blank checks out by the tens of thousands every single day.
Michael
I once had a credit account that sent these checks about every month. I asked them to stop, twice, and I finally just closed the account. Another company complied when I asked them to stop, and I’m still with them.
That happened to us once.
We had specifically told the credit card company NOT to send any more of the checks. They sent some anyway. Our mail was stolen from the mailbox, and we had no idea that there were checks in it until the charges came through.
I asked Citibank to quit sending them, and they did. I think it took a couple calls though.
You can ask, but they don’t want to stop. I believe these checks count as a cash advance, and therefore are extortionately expensive/profitable. Which far outweighs the increased fraud writeoffs and complaints from customers.
What are they even for? You can already use your card to get cash at a bank, or at an ATM, if you remember the PIN.
They’re convenient if you have, for instance, a bill you need to pay by mail. If you get the cash advance, you’re going to pay the same rate on the money, and this saves you from having to also pay to get a cashier’s check.
I’m told. :rolleyes:
You can use them to pay bills by mail, or use them for private transactions (such as buying a car) when the other party can’t take a credit card.
I think it’s funny how the ones I get have fine print on them saying that they cannot be used to pay off a balance on the account they’re written on.
What? You mean I can’t pay my Visa bill with my Visa? Why not?
deleted.
Y’know, I never thought of that! Not that I have enough credit to buy a decent new car, anyway (maybe a crappy used one). (At any rate, no worries; I don’t plan on owning a car for a very long time–if ever–or unless I move someplace with public transit (or, no public transit) that’s inadequate for my needs.)
I get these things, too. I just tear them into the smallest pieces possible. (I don’t yet own a shredder. Maybe I’ll use one of those damned checks to buy one.) 
Hell yeah these checks are risky.
Back in 2000, some scumbag managed to get their hands on a set of credit card checks that American Express sent to me unsolicited. When I got my statement the following month, I was astounded to find out that five checks totaling over $13,700 had been cashed simply by signing my name and then depositing them into a checking account that was then immediately drawn down and closed out. Amex was able to tell me the amounts and who the checks were made out to (all to the same person), but after that they declared they couldn’t discuss it with me anymore because it was a fraud investigation.
In the end, I was completely exonerated of all charges/fees/credit damage (I monitored my credit report closely for any reporting of the incident), but I was doubly pissed by the fact that:
1.) Amex sent the checks in the first place, although that was a regular thing for them, and
B.) They didn’t become suspicious after the first check, because I had no balance and no activity on that account for over a year. All of the sudden, 5 checks for $13.7K? WTF? Where was the fraud prevention monitoring?
Amex was insistent that I sign up for a new account, so I did -with the caveat that they not issue me unsolicited checks. But then they promptly raised my interest rate to 23.9%, and within six months they were mailing checks again. I immediately called and cancelled my account, and do the same for other cards that insist on mailing checks. As others have mentioned, it sometimes takes more than a few calls to get the checks stopped, and their automated account review software probably starts automatically sending them again after a specific time period anyway.
I recently requested that two of my credit cards stop sending me these checks; one by phone when they called me about a possible upgrade of my account, and the other (Discover) by sending them a message through my online account. Now I just need to see if they actually follow through, particularly since in addition to occasionally mailing them to me they both usually include some with my monthly statements.
I bought my car with one of those blank checks but you must be careful. I paid $75 to borrow almost $10,000 at a very low interest rate. Fortunately I had no other outstanding debt on that card. If I had continued to use the card all payments made on the card would have gone toward the low interest charge first and any subsequent charges would have accumulated at the original exorbitant rate. These deals are only good if you have another card to use until the borrowed money is paid back. Otherwise you can do better going to your bank or a credit union.
A scam I fell prey to from these credit card companies is the unsolicited invitation to accept a new credit card because of “your excellent credit, you are pre-approved.” They then invite you to transfer all of your current obligations to their card at a low rate, all the while talking about your great credit rating. However in the fine print where you are somewat unlikely to see it they tell you that you could fall into a class of consumer who is insufficiently credit worthy to merit the low rate but the transfers will still be approved at a much higher rate. This happened to me, courtesy of Fleet Bank of Boston, may they all rot in hell, and I had to do some serious scrambling. Beware.
It sounds to me that maybe the way to stop them is with a registered letter (return receipt) that says that you will not use them and will not be responsible for any checks written on them.
I guess this hasn’t got to Canada yet, since I have not received any. I do get unsolicited requests for credit cards, though, but not the cards themselves.
Huh, I live in Toronto, and I get some of those cheques every week. I wonder how you avoid them.
Interesting. I wonder whether Quebec has banned them.
Nope - I got them from my TD Visa often enough. At least a couple of times a year, a set of three or four blank “Visa cheques” would be waiting for me in the mailbox.
I’m in Canada and get them too. I hate them and see them as a nothing more than a risk of fraud.
I’ve had some success in getting them to stop sending them in their own junk mail envleopes, but they still come with my statement sometimes.