Signature Service
One of the two signatures of Abrahan Lincoln below is genuine. I penned the other one after about two minutes of practice. I won’t tell you which is which. It doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s simple to forge a signature.
Many business owners believe that since they sign every check (or believe they do) there’s no way that a back-office employee can steal the business’ money.
Sadly, they’re mistaken. Although signing every check is a deterrent, signature-forging is so easy (as evidenced above) that a bookkeeper or an office manager could sign anything in the owner’s name – checks, credit card applications, bank account applications – and most people who examine the signature would be unable to tell that the signature was forged.
Forgery is a common fraud scheme. The amount of money that businesses have lost to forgeries is mind-boggling. Here’s a recent example:
Wisconsin Kitchen Mart’s owner Nancy Rossman recently discovered that over a five-year period her trusted bookkeeper had written and cashed 79 unauthorized checks payable to the bookkeeper’s husband. The bookkeeper simply forged the signatures of Rossman or Rossman’s husband and business co-owner Jeffrey on the checks.
The checks totaled $49,268 in 2006, $182,560 in 2007, $172,044 in 2008 and $213,560 in 2009. To avoid detection the bookkeeper recorded the checks as having been written to legitimate Wisconsin Kitchen Mart vendors. You can read the story here: Retail Establishment Embezzlement Story.
One reason why thefts such as these go undiscovered for years is that no one – other than perhaps the perpetrator – is looking to see who checks are actually made out to.
Preventing forgeries like these can be difficult. But deterring and detecting them often requires just a few minutes a month to look over bank statements.
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The TraceTech Solutions’ blog specializes in articles that discuss actual small-business frauds and what small-business owners can do to prevent them. Start from the most-recent article here: TraceTech Solutions’ Blog. We publish new articles frequently. If you’d like to receive a new article the instant that it’s published, click on the Subscription link in the upper right part of this page.
TraceTech Solutions provides small businesses with unique low-cost fraud monitoring and detection services. Learn more about TraceTech’s services here: TraceTech Solutions website.
