I had been expecting a not insubstantial reimbursement check from my flex plan, but it hadn’t arrived. I contacted them and today they sent me a picture of the cancelled check.
The signature on the back was not mine.
Our HR department is now looking into it. The check had to have been intercepted before it got to my local PO (I get an email each day showing what mail I will be getting, and it never showed in any of them). So it either happened at the people running the reimbursements or the post office where they mailed it.
HR department has the number of the account where it was deposited, so they should be able to track things down.
It’s not going to cause me any financial hardship, but it is a major annoyance.
I feel for you. I once had my outgoing mail stolen. It included a payment to a friend who runs a picture framing shop. He called me six weeks later to ask when I was going to pay him. I told him he had cashed the check. Nope, sez he.
I looked it up. His business name had been crossed out and someone’s name written in, with my initials alongside (not my handwriting). It had been cashed at USBank, using a false account number. USBank refused to refund me the money because the check had my initials, even though the account number didn’t exist or did a person with that name have an account there. We were all screwed.
I did pay the friend, but it took an effort to replace the money that had already been set aside for it. I now always drop my outgoing mail directly to the post office.
I worked with a company that sent out a lot of checks, checks were part of their business model.
It was almost like a game for the people I worked for. They knew that a certain % of their checks would be stolen or fraudulently cashed, and they had systems in place to minimize that and respond to that and deal with that, and it was a cost of doing business.
The banks didn’t accept any responsibility for anything. The business didn’t expect to get any money from them.
I figure I was lucky. A friend of mine lost everything – including his home – after someone gained access to his accounts. It took a GoFundMe to tide him over and he has confessed he came close to suicide over it.
This is an old-fashioned theft of a check. None of my account information is anywhere; they just endorsed and deposited it into their account. Didn’t even endorse it with anything that looks like my name.