Raising checks has become the greatest danger to the banks. There is no comparison between raising checks with a genuine signature and forging the signature itself, so far as ease of execution is concerned. After many years of arduous work and after great expenditures of money the banks have to admit sorrowfully that if a man wants to raise a check he can do it; and the detection, while, of course, inevitable when the paid check returns to the depositor, is not immediate enough to prevent the swindler from getting away with the money.
That is why the most implacable enemy of the men who dare raise or falsify a check is the American Bankers' Association. This great concern in reality is a protective association, and it relentlessly hunts down all forgers first, last, and all the time. It never lets up, absolutely never, no matter time, money, or trouble. It bitterly pursues defaulters for the sake of justice, but it has still another object in its deadly trailing of forgers and check tampereus. That is because the whole banking structure hangs on signed paper. When it can be altered with impunity, away goes the financial system of to-day. Hence the unrelenting hunting-down of forgers who trifle with men's names. On the books of more than one large detective agency of the country are cases more than ten years old. The forgers never have been found, but the hunt still goes on. Reports of the chase come in regularly and the books will not be closed until the hunt stops at prison doors or beside a grave.
Yet with all this remorseless hunting, check-raising flourishes so well all over the United States that the banks fear to give even a hint as to the sums of which they or their depositors are robbed each year. The magnitude of the amount would frighten too many persons.
For a time it was thought that the use of chemically prepared paper would prove a safeguard, because any erasure or alteration would show immediately. The chemicals used in its composition would make the ink run if acids were used to change the figures. But among the check-raisers there were chemists just as clever as the chemists who devised the prepared paper.
Then paper with watermarks woven through it was used. But it, too, became an easy mark for the chemists who had gone wrong.
Finally, and until recently, the banking world thought that it had struck the absolute safeguard by using a machine to stamp on the check the exact amount for which it was drawn, the machine perforating the paper as it stamped it. Certainly it does seem that when the paper is cut right out of the check, leaving nothing but holes, no change is humanly possible. But the completeness of this supposed safeguard has offered a tempting field for the check-raiser.
A special detective in the employ of the American Bankers' Association, who has spent half the years of his mature life in running down forgers and check-raisers, said that it was "too easy" to raise checks, and that a good many more men than try it now would do it were it not for the well-known relentlessness of the association in running down offenders against any single one of its constituent members.
"Write me a check for any sum you want," said the sleuth, "and I'll show you."
A check for $200 was written and passed over to him. In less than two minutes, without an erasure of any kind, the check called for $500, and the work was done so well even in that short time that the writer would have been tempted to believe that he had made an error and really drawn the check for that amount had he not been sure to the contrary.
"That kind of raising is easy," said the expert. "You see it demands no interlining or extending of words. The check-raiser simply knows how well certain characters lend themselves to changes that cannot be detected. The capital T in almost every man's handwriting can be changed to a capital F without any trouble by even an unskilled crook."