Paper checks are a love letter to inefficiency.
But we keep writing them. Thirty times a year, we pull out that blue book, carefully inscribe the amount (twice!), and send our financial details floating through the physical world like a paper airplane made of money.
Here's the thing: we're not just being old-fashioned. We're being dangerous.
While France, our closest competitor in this antiquated dance, writes half as many checks as we do, most of Europe has already moved on. They've embraced the future, while we're still licking envelopes.
The cost of this nostalgia? A 400% surge in check fraud in just one year. $700 million vanished from banks and credit unions.¹ That's not a typo. That's your money.
The scam is embarrassingly simple. Thieves don't need sophisticated hacking tools or advanced degrees in computer science. They just need a mailbox key and some household chemicals. They're literally washing your checks and rewriting them, like some twisted version of a grade school art project.
But here's what makes this absurd: we have alternatives. Real, working, secure alternatives. Zelle, PayPal, Venmo, credit cards, and yes, even Bitcoin. These aren't future technologies we're waiting for. They're here, now, waiting for us to wake up.
Banks are trying to protect us from ourselves. They're freezing accounts, adding holds, creating barriers. But it's like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. The real solution is to stop writing checks altogether.
The question isn't whether checks will disappear. The question is whether you'll be one of the last people clinging to them when they do.
Your move.
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