Check-Raising Always a Danger—­A Scheme Almost Impossible to
Prevent—­The American Bankers’ Association the Greatest Foe to
Forgers—­It Follows Them Relentlessly and Successfully—­Chemically
Prepared Paper and Watermarks Not Always a Safeguard—­Perforating
Machines and Check Raisers—­How Check Perforations Are Overcome—­How an
Ordinary Check Is Raised—­How an Expert Alters Checks—­How Perforations
Are Filled—­Hasty Examination by Paying Tellers Encourages
Forgers—­The Way Bogus Checks Creep Through a Bank Unnoticed—­A
Celebrated Forgery Case—­Forgers Successful for a Time Always
Caught—­Where Forgers Usually Go That Have Made a Big Haul—­A
Professional Crook Is a Person of Large Acquaintance.

Raising checks has become the greatest danger to the banks.  There is no comparison between raising checks with a genuine signature and forging the signature itself, so far as ease of execution is concerned.  After many years of arduous work and after great expenditures of money the banks have to admit sorrowfully that if a man wants to raise a check he can do it; and the detection, while, of course, inevitable when the paid check returns to the depositor, is not immediate enough to prevent the swindler from getting away with the money.

That is why the most implacable enemy of the men who dare raise or falsify a check is the American Bankers’ Association.  This great concern in reality is a protective association, and it relentlessly hunts down all forgers first, last, and all the time.  It never lets up, absolutely never, no matter time, money, or trouble.  It bitterly pursues defaulters for the sake of justice, but it has still another object in its deadly trailing of forgers and check tampereus.  That is because the whole banking structure hangs on signed paper.  When it can be altered with impunity, away goes the financial system of to-day.  Hence the unrelenting hunting-down of forgers who trifle with men’s names.  On the books of more than one large detective agency of the country are cases more than ten years old.  The forgers never have been found, but the hunt still goes on.  Reports of the chase come in regularly and the books will not be closed until the hunt stops at prison doors or beside a grave.

Yet with all this remorseless hunting, check-raising flourishes so well all over the United States that the banks fear to give even a hint as to the sums of which they or their depositors are robbed each year.  The magnitude of the amount would frighten too many persons.

For a time it was thought that the use of chemically prepared paper would prove a safeguard, because any erasure or alteration would show immediately.  The chemicals used in its composition would make the ink run if acids were used to change the figures.  But among the check-raisers there were chemists just as clever as the chemists who devised the prepared paper.

Then paper with watermarks woven through it was used.  But it, too, became an easy mark for the chemists who had gone wrong.