Bank fraud

Bank fraud is the use of potentially illegal means to obtain money, assets, or other property owned or held by a financial institution, or to obtain money from depositors by fraudulently posing as a bank or other financial institution. In many instances, bank fraud is a criminal offence. While the specific elements of particular banking fraud laws vary depending on jurisdictions, the term bank fraud applies to actions that employ a scheme or artifice, as opposed to bank robbery or theft. For this reason, bank fraud is sometimes considered a white-collar crime.

Fraudsters may seek access to facilities such as mailrooms, post offices, offices of a tax authority, a corporate payroll or a social or veterans' benefit office, which process cheques in large numbers. The fraudsters then may open bank accounts under assumed names and deposit the cheques, which they may first alter in order to appear legitimate, so that they can subsequently withdraw unauthorised funds.

Alternatively, forgers gain unauthorised access to blank chequebooks, and forge seemingly legitimate signatures on the cheques, also in order to illegally gain access to unauthorized funds.

Cheque kiting exploits a banking system known as "the float" wherein money is temporarily counted twice. When a cheque is deposited to an account at Bank X, the money is made available immediately in that account even though the corresponding amount of money is not immediately removed from the account at Bank Y at which the cheque is drawn. Thus both banks temporarily count the cheque amount as an asset until the cheque formally clears at Bank Y. The float serves a legitimate purpose in banking, but intentionally exploiting the float when funds at Bank Y are insufficient to cover the amount withdrawn from Bank X is a form of fraud.

Fraudsters have altered cheques to change the name (in order to deposit cheques intended for payment to someone else) or the amount on the face of cheques, simple altering can change $100.00 into $100,000.00, although transactions of this value are subject to investigation as a precaution to prevent fraud as policy.

Instead of tampering with a real cheque, fraudsters may alternatively attempt to forge a depositor's signature on a blank cheque or even print their own cheques drawn on accounts owned by others, non-existent accounts, etc. They would subsequently cash the fraudulent cheque through another bank and withdraw the money before the banks realise that the cheque was a fraud.

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Wikipedia