When I signed up for my bank account and got my check book they started it at #1000. Apparently a check book starting with #1 looks suspicious. I really don’t understand how it makes any difference. How does the check number look suspicious when it’s the same check if it’s 1001 or 1.
In: Economics
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Check #1 means you’ve never written a check for that account before, which means it’s probably a brand new account and you might have even made the account specifically for this transaction. That can seem a bit suspicious.
It’s dated & illogical “thinking” – since you can have checks printed anywhere starting with any number you like, it’s an idiotic assumption that the number means anything, especially in today’s high-tech world. It’s the illusion of a “security check” that has utterly ***no*** meaning to a sane & rational person with *any* kind of a clue.
Basically Boomer “logic.”
Previously: You walk into a bank, open up a checking count and get your first fifty checks free. And Check Kiters would take advantage of this.
Check kiters would go on a spending spree with those starter checks, often numbered 1-50. And if you are kiting checks, you never get the check numbers built up through regularly using checks to pay bills. Nowadays most bills are paid online, so checks aren’t needed. But previously if you had an apartment or house, you could go through half a dozen checks (rent/mortgage, power, phone, water/sewer. insurance, car payment) each month before any other kinds of expenses (groceries, other shopping), so going through the first couple hundred checks and getting your check numbers built up was not a long term issue.
But check kiters would get their hands on the first fifty or hundred checks, use them and move on to another bank account as fast as they could (yes, you can list how many felonies this is pretty quickly). And everytime they opened a new bank account, they check numbers they were using would be reset to 1.
And it got bad enough that some stores just stopped accepting checks below 100 as a matter of doing business to limit exposure to check kiters.
These days checks are not used as much due to cards (I haven’t written a check in ten years, before that I wrote checks semi-regularly for some bills).
I never understood this. In the 80’s I bumped into places that would not take low check numbers. When I ordered my very first checks from my bank, the form let me provide a starting number. I started at 500 and never had a problem using them.
In that era, requiring checks to have names and addresses made sense. It was a lot harder to obtain checks that matched your name without a valid bank account, but the starting number has never been hard to control.
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