Check fraud is back in a big way, so much so that postal authorities and bank officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks if possible, or at least to use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office. Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, last year. That's up from 350,000 reports in 2021. Meanwhile the US Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, more than double the prior year's total, reports the AP. Early in the pandemic, government relief checks became an attractive target for criminals. The problem has only gotten worse, despite the fact that check usage has been in decline for decades. Americans wrote roughly 3.4 billion checks in 2022, down from nearly 19 billion checks in 1990, according to the Federal Reserve. However, the average size of the checks Americans write rose from $673 in 1990—or $1,602 in today's dollars—to $2,652 last year.
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