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Secure Payments  Threats to Cheques
The process of cheque fraud usually follows along these lines:
- A valid, fully completed and signed cheque is intercepted before it reaches the recipient, either in the issuing company's offices or in the postal system.
- The payee name and/or the amount is removed using a scalpel to scratch it off or chemicals. The signatures are left alone
- New information is added to the now blank cheque to suit the purposes of the criminals, and the cheque is deposited and the monies withdrawn!
Unless the alterations are easily visible or gross negligence can be proven, the banks will not accept liability and so you loose the money.
NB The criminal's job is made even easier if you use a laser printer or a black dot matrix printer.
Hand-written cheques are just as vulnerable. The ink is easily removed and replaced by anyone's handwriting.
Threats to EFT
The main threats to EFT payments are as follows:
- Unlike cheques, there is no "paper trail" to follow, therefore detection is more difficult and a higher level of expertise is required to investigate fraud.
- Whilst we as humans look at names the bank's computer system look only at numbers. It is therefore easy to change the bank account number and leave the payee name untouched. The upshot of this is that we think the correct person or company has been paid but the money has gone to the fraudster's account.
- Duplicate payments can be made inadvertently or maliciously and are not easy to detect.
- Unlike cheques, there is no opportunity to stop an erroneous payment. Once the EFT instruction reaches the bank, payment is made within hours and cannot be reversed without the beneficiary's assistance.
Solutions to Cheque Fraud
To stop criminals fraudulently altering your cheques you need to:
- Make it all but impossible to scratch out payee or amount details. This is done by using a super-bold font and a heavy-duty impact or dot matrix printer. The super-bold font makes for more work and the impact printer beats the ink deep into the paper.
- Make it all but impossible to use chemicals to remove information. This is done by using good-quality security paper and appropriate fugitive inks that run when coming into contact with chemicals. Speak to your cheque stationery supplier.
- Make it all but impossible to add information to the payee or amount. This is done by filling all empty spaces in front and behind legitimate information with super-bold fill characters.
- Make it all but impossible to duplicate the super-bold font. This is done by using a non-standard font and multiple colours.
Criminals are lazy and if the task is too hard or too time-consuming, they will look for easier prey elsewhere.
To see what a secure cheque looks like click here
Solutions to EFT Fraud
To stop criminals fraudulently altering EFT payment information you need to:
- Cross-check recipient account number against an independent source
- Check for duplicate payments.
- Check for payments made before due date (middle of the month for example)
- Keep an accurate audit trail of all payments submitted to the bank.
Cirrus TechVue have been active in the field of secure document printing (primarily cheques) for over ten years, and for the last three years have been developing related systems for improving the security of EFT payments. We are pleased to announce that we have enhanced our cheque payment system, Pandora DB, to include the option of fingerprint authentication, and extended it to provide greater security for EFT payments in the form of Pandora EFT. Both kinds of payments can be managed by a single system incorporating the functions of cheque and EFT payments.
Pandora EFT features and benefits:
| Comprehensive authorisation controls by account, amount, and A/B signatory levels. |
Full control over who authorises what. |
| Separation of duties between administration, setup, payment authorisation, and operation. |
Minimises the risk of fraudulent operation. |
| Biometric (fingerprint) authentication option. |
Prevents password-swapping |
| Checking for duplicate payments to the same bank account, regardless of beneficiary name, with exception highlighting and exception lists. |
Catches attempts to divert multiple payments to the wrong account. |
| Checking for changes in the beneficiary name / account number linkage. |
Detects fiddling with account details. |
| Strong security protecting the payments database. |
Guards against more sophisticated insider attacks |
| Reports and audit logs. |
Tracks who did what and when, to support forensic investigation. |
Pandora EFT significantly reduces risk associated with electronic payments.
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