The new year is giving scammers an easy way to forge documents, but business owners can protect themselves with an easy New Year’s resolution: Stop abbreviating the year.
This story by Sarah Brookbank and Joel Shannon originally appeared in USA Today.
This year’s abbreviation is easily changeable and could be used against you. The concern is that scammers could easily manipulate a document dated “1/1/20” into “1/1/2000” or even “1/1/2021.”
Writing out the full date “could possibly protect you and prevent legal issues on paperwork,” according to Hamilton County, Ohio, Auditor Dusty Rhodes.
While it’s early in the year for examples of this kind of fraud to emerge, the threat is real according to Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. Rheingold said scammers could use the method to establish an unpaid debt or to attempt to cash an old check.
In the future, post-dating could be a problem too. For example, a check dated “1/1/20” could become “1/1/2021” next year, possibly making the uncashed check active again, Rheingold wrote. A similar method could be used for debts that are past the statute of limits.
The solution is easy: There’s no harm in writing the full date. Writing the month out can also help.
