“Jordan Critchlow,” the Feds are looking for you. And for you, “Karen Woodson.”
Are those even your names? They’re what you called yourselves when you fooled my bank and grabbed my money — $5,620.
Fraud scholars tell me the dark art used against me is called “check washing,” the latest old-school crime to make an unexpected resurgence, like carjacking or in-person identity theft, at least partly because of modern, digital anti-fraud technology.
It took a month to get that cash back from our duped bank, WSFS. It would have been a tough month if, like so many Americans, we were living paycheck to paycheck, in these times of high inflation.
Federal agents suspect our monthly Delmarva Power check may have been among the items stolen right out of the blue mailboxes at the Talleyville, Del., post office, which faces busy U.S. Route 202. “You have been identified as a possible victim,” the head of a multifunctional team of Philadelphia-based postal inspectors wrote me in a letter that arrived June 13, detailing the brazen burglary.
» READ MORE: Checks are being stolen from Postal Service mailboxes, raising concerns about the blue boxes’ security
According to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and industry groups, this sort of old-fashioned check fraud is becoming more common — a fact investigators blame, ironically, on digital anti-fraud technology — which is also a cause of our current epidemic of carjacking.
Does that sound backward? To be sure, the…
