In many cases of discrepancy between the two amounts on the face of a check the sum involved is the fractional part of the dollar at the end of the chief figures.  This comes about through the drawer’s concern over the main figures in the check.  He is likely to write the amount in letters on the center line of the body of the check, affixing the fractional part of a dollar in the form of 100th parts of that unit.  In writing the checking group in figures at the upper or lower corner of the slip, his chief concern is with the dollars and in his care he is likely to overlook the odd cents first entered on the face of the paper.  Or if he attempts to write the figures “74” cents in repetition it is likely that they may be transposed to “47” cents in the operation.

How to write this check in order that it may not be tampered with and “raised” is something that has held the attentions and invited the inventive talents of many people, in and out of business.  Even when the best of the chemical papers are used in the bank check the drawer of the paper may have not the slightest protection from “raising” at the hands of an expert.  The manner in which the written and figure amounts on the face of the check are placed makes the material alteration of the amount easy beyond question.

For instance, the man who writes with a free, flowing, rounded hand and leaves roomy spaces everywhere between words and figures becomes an easy mark for a forger.  This man is called upon to draw his check for $4, even.  He takes his check book and in the dollar line writes the word “four” in his rounded hand, simply filling the rest of the lined space with the plain flourish of his pen.  Then in the upper corner of the check he writes the attesting figure $4, with a dash after it.  That makes it a cinch for an expert check raiser to make it $40 or $400 or $4,000.

Manifestly the only safeguard for such a check as this, even if it be drawn upon chemical paper, is for the drawer to follow close upon the written “four” with the blocking “No-100th” dollars, using the same fraction as closely after the figure “4” in the corner of the check.  To leave no possible room after a final written or figure amount on a check is the best possible precaution against raising it.  For with many checks the printed warning “Not good if drawn for more than one hundred dollars,” is a worthless precaution.  In the above example it is so, for the reason that raised as it is the amount still is within the limit.  Had the check been drawn in the same style for “six” dollars, it would have been more easily and profitably raised to “sixty.”  In the same general manner a slovenly “two” may be raised to “twenty,” “three” may be “thirty,” “five” is made “fifty,” “seven” becomes “seventy,” “eight” becomes “eighty,” and “nine” is transformed into “ninety”—­all without erasures and without leaving telltale marks upon a chemical paper.

In this way the average check which is made payable “to bearer” may be a potential menace in a slow course through a dozen hands.  While a bank may require the holder of a “bearer” check to indorse his name upon the back, that indorsement means nothing to him.  The check is payable to the bearer and the teller must pay it if it appears all right and he is certain of the signature at the bottom.