Forgery

So my wife calls me at work yesterday and says “Who is Patrick McGillford?”.

I’m like “who?”

“Patrick McGillford” she says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You wrote him a check for $1,652 on Monday.”

Now at this point I’m thinking she’s completely lost it. I wrote checks to PG&E, our water company, our security alarm company, but no Patrick McGillford. And I’d only been home about 24 hours. There’s no way it could be anyone else.

We fire up the BofA website and I take a look at the check in question. Yep. That’s my signature… but nothing else on the check is my handwriting. Straight up forged check.

Sharon needed to head into the bank to have that account closed and to alert them to the fraud. Evidently in our area it’s happening daily. What we think happened is that someone took the checks out of our mailbox on Friday (flag was up :)). They then worked some magic in photoshop to remove all of the amount and to information, and then wrote in their own, keeping my signature and account information all intact, printed it out on a color printer and then marched off to the bank to cash it.

Looks like the teller wasn’t astute enough to catch it.

Sneaky bastards.