The advice landing in consumer inboxes is getting blunter: stop putting checks in the mail.
A New York Times personal finance column published last week told readers plainly not to send checks through the postal system, and quoted a Consumer Federation of America official saying no one should ever mail a check. The piece is the latest sign that mainstream outlets now treat paper checks as a liability rather than a routine payment tool, a shift with implications for the collection agencies, debt buyers and creditors that still receive and process them.
The column traced the case of a Washington, D.C. retiree who mailed a tax payment of roughly $3,700 to a state revenue office last year. The check was intercepted, altered to name a different payee, and deposited remotely at a second bank. Ten months passed before she discovered the fraud, and she has so far recovered nothing from either institution involved. Each bank pointed to timing: one said it learned of the claim more than a year after deposit, when no funds remained to recover.
That timing problem is the operational heart of the story. The reporting noted that banks typically allow somewhere between 10 and 90 days from statement availability to report suspected check fraud, and that the clock starts when an electronic statement posts, not when a customer opens it. Consumers who skim a one-line debit entry without pulling the check image can miss an altered payee until the reporting window has closed.
The mechanics described will be familiar to ARM compliance teams. Thieves “fish” checks from drop boxes, run them through chemical “check washing” to lift the original payee, and favor mobile deposit and ATM channels to avoid contact with bank staff. A 2025 poll cited in the article found that more than a fifth of adults have either experienced check fraud or know someone who has, even as two-thirds say they rarely or never write checks.
For the industry, the takeaway is twofold. Consumer-facing guidance increasingly steers payers toward online bill pay and electronic options, a trend that should accelerate the migration of collection payments to digital channels. At the same time, the checks that remain in circulation carry elevated fraud and liability risk, raising questions about how agencies verify, image and reconcile mailed payments before posting them.
