Fraud hits home -- my front porch!

When it comes to protecting myself against identify theft, I like to think that I’m pretty savvy.

I pay most of my bills online, and every day or two I check the transactions in my bank and credit card accounts. Once a year, I request personal reports from all three credit bureaus. And I always shred credit card solicitations, ATM withdrawal slips and receipts bearing my signature.

So when I received an answering machine message early last month from a woman named Josephine who claimed to work for Bank of America Corp., I thought I knew just what was going on.

This was one of those “phishing” scams, I thought, in which a thief pretends to be a bank representative and gathers personal information from unsuspecting victims.

I wasn’t going to take the bait.

But as it turned out, I already had been had.

Someone had stolen an envelope containing a bill payment that I had left for the mail carrier on my front porch. My $200 check to a student loan vendor had been altered. It was now a $600 check to a stranger, who scrawled in the memo line that it was for maintenance and labor.

It’s a crime called check washing or check bleaching. A thief gets hold of a completed and signed check, uses chemicals to strip away the writing and then adds a new recipient and dollar amount. From what I’ve read, it happens all the time.

When I returned Josephine’s call, she said something about the check didn’t seem quite right to her. The texture felt odd and it appeared altered. She photocopied the man’s driver’s license and the check -- then refused to cash it when she couldn’t reach me to confirm its authenticity.

Josephine asked me whether I knew this man and whether I recently had hired anyone to perform maintenance. My answers: no and no. My wife and I live in a rental house, and upkeep is handled by our landlord.

Besides, I told her, I had a carbon copy of the actual check that I wrote to the student loan firm. My heart was racing. How could I fall victim to something like this? I felt violated.

I rushed out the door, drove to the Burbank branch where Josephine works and got a copy of the altered check and the man’s license. She was incredibly helpful.

Later that night, I filed a report with the Burbank Police Department.

The clock was ticking, though, and the suspect was well positioned to take even more money from me. Armed with my bank routing number and checking account information, he easily could print blank checks or stock up on expensive merchandise online.

What if our accounts were drained? Would we ever get that money back?

I had no choice but to immediately close my account and reorganize my financial life.

My wife’s direct deposit had to be rerouted. Our automatic bill payments had to be changed. I had to explain what happened to the student loan company, which hadn’t been paid. I ordered new checks, waited for new debit cards. And I placed a security alert on file with the credit bureaus -- just in case.

For two days, I could think -- or talk -- about little else. I kept staring at the photocopy of the altered check, wondering just how many other lives the suspect had thrown into disarray.

Just when I thought we had done all we could, my wife and I were in for another surprise.

We learned that the suspect, after being turned away by Josephine, went to another Bank of America branch several miles away and was able to cash the check.

Sure enough, within days, $600 was taken out of our new account.

And even though our old account was closed, the bank had withdrawn the money out of the new one.

Here we go again, I thought. I wanted this nightmare to be over.

It took 11 days and numerous calls to Bank of America to get the money back. I never received a good explanation about why this all happened.

What bothers me most about this ordeal is that I can no longer send mail from my house.

As a child growing up in Michigan, I would beg my parents to let me run down the driveway, put the outgoing mail in our mailbox and raise the little red flag to let our carrier know that we had outgoing mail. Over my lifetime, I had mailed thousands of letters, cards and bills from home without any problems.

But this experience jolted me out of that habit -- and if you’re still doing it, you’re taking a big risk.

Mailing a check now requires a visit to the post office or, at the very least, a trip to a blue box on the sidewalk.

The Burbank police detective investigating my case said his job also had taught him to be cautious about his outgoing mail.

“I grew up in Burbank. We had a house here, had a mailbox out front and that’s where we put it,” Det. Mike Parrinello told me.

And now? “I take everything to the post office,” he said.

Parrinello told me that this kind of check fraud can be difficult to prosecute. In my case, the suspect used a real driver’s license, which made it easier to track him down. But many check fraudsters use fake IDs that they buy in MacArthur Park or some other criminal hot spot. And some insist that they worked for the money and that they too are victims of a check scam.

My financial life is back in order, I think. But I’m not entirely sure that I’ve learned my lesson.

Instead of picking up my new checks at the bank, I had them sent to me the old-fashioned way: in the mail.

charles.ornstein@latimes.com