In recent weeks, DOTmed has reported on ways to safeguard your business when purchasing medical equipment. You've heard the warning: Caveat emptor--let the buyer beware. But our Honest/Dishonest Forums also reveal some perils for brokers of medical equipment as they accept funds from buyers around the world. In this report, we caution: Caveat vendor--let the seller beware.

Case in point is the DOTmed user who posted that he received a cashiers check only to discover from the bank that the payee name had been changed to his name. In other words, the bank could not honor the check, which had been altered.

"That's a huge problem right now," said Frank W. Abagnale, a secure document consultant and expert authority on forgery and embezzlement. "The big problem is that people are extremely nave. They believe that because it says cashiers check or official money order that for some reason its gold or just like cash. Maybe 15 years ago that was pretty true. But that's not the case anymore."
Abagnale is famous for being the subject of the feature film Catch Me If You Can, which dramatized his exploits as a con artist, master of disguise, and expert forger. (Dont worry, that was decades ago, before he went straight and started teaching at the FBI Academy.)

"Years ago, in order to forge a check, like back when I did it, you had to have a Heidelberg printing press. That press was about a million dollars," Abagnale explained. "There were color separations, there were negatives, there were plates. And back then cashiers checks from banks were very sophisticated. They had high-resolution borders. They had lots of security features built in which were very difficult to replicate."

Today's standard are not so high. Abagnale bemoaned cost-cutting by banks and the ease of access to technologies that make it easy to fake even cashiers checks, which today are printed on cheap stock. "Banks use ordinary, over-the-counter check paper that anybody can buy at Office Depot or Staples," he said.

"Anyone with a computer and printer can cut and paste a bank logo onto a dummy check and create a credible facsimile. They [the crooks] are creating what seems to be the most beautiful looking cashiers check on their laptop in about 15 minutes....Because most checks are laser printed, including cashiers checks, they are just using a color laser printer to print it. They can even sometimes go into a bank and buy a cashiers check--especially at a medium-sized regional community bank. Then they turn around and, because most banks use self-correcting typewriters to type those cashiers checks, they [use] a self-correcting typewriter, delete the dollar amount, delete who it's made out to, and then type in a new amount. So people are generating these cashiers checks today because [it's] so simple to do."

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