GREENSBORO, N.C. — Valentine’s day is a week away. I’m old school and I’m sending cards to friends and family through the mail. Some of them contain gift cards.
What I’m not doing is dropping the cards into the blue mailbox outside of the post office when it's after the collection hours.
If there's anything of value, a gift card, or a check to pay a bill, you don't want it sitting in this box overnight.
Here’s what happens. Thieves target the boxes.
“They take a water bottle put some sticky stuff on it and kind of go fishing in the mailbox, they swirl it around, the sticky stuff picks up the mail, they pull it out and then they have all this mail,” said Paige Hanson, Norton Lifelock.
The blue mailbox thief then has the gift card you dropped in there or they have the check you wrote.
Thieves use acetone like nail polish remover or paint thinner to lift the ink off the check. They change the amount and the payee.
Even if you don’t drop checks in the mail, you still want to protect yourself if you do write checks.
3 Things To Do To Protect Your Checking Account
1- Always use a gel-based pen. You can get them at Walmart or Target. The ink of a gel-based pen can't be lifted by acetone.
2-Put alerts on your checking account so you know when any transaction goes through and for how much.
3-When you give someone a check, ask them if they’re going to mobile deposit the check. If so, usually they would scan your check and do what with it? Most people just throw the check away, making it easy pickings for thieves.
Have the conversation, either ask them to deposit it in front of you and take your check back, or ask them to shred the check when they're done.