MONTICELLO — The Management and Budget Committee meeting of the Legislature on June 12 opened with alarming news: check fraud is rampant in Sullivan County. 

County Treasurer Nancy Buck reported widespread check fraud within the payment system of the Treasurer that started in 2022 and totals $214,000 worth of fraudulent checks. A total of 42 checks from seven separate Treasurer accounts have been detected as fraudulent as of June 12, according to Buck.

“We started getting check fraud in [2022], our very first one was a DFS (Department of Family Services) check for $22,000.” 

Buck said they detected 12 fraudulent checks in 2023 and one of these checks for $57,000 came from the Treasurer’s General Fund. She said that in 2023, the fraud was happening in the mail: “There was a post office in New York City where they were stealing checks, it wasn’t just in the county; it was all over. The F.B.I. was involved obviously because it’s federal.”

Buck said local sheriffs were also involved because the Treasurer has to report the fraud to law enforcement and prove to the banks that it was reported; at that point, the two banks involved in the transaction battle each other until a resolution is reached. “So far we’re being paid for all of [the fraudulent checks],” said Buck. 

There were eight fraudulent checks in 2024 and Buck described the various methods criminals use to alter checks: “Sometimes they have a copy of the check with my signature on it, and they scrub the name and the dollar amount, then they’ll change that. Sometimes, what’s been happening recently…they took the ABA number [routing number] of the bank and the checking account and totally changed a different check so that our bank account is being charged.” 

Buck said they discovered one instance of fraud when a vendor called her office on June 11 saying he never got paid. 

“We looked into it and so they scrubbed the name and changed it and left the check [amount] the same. And the font and everything was so good you couldn’t even tell the difference; so that one we might have a little trouble with the bank because that one went through.”

District 7 Legislator and Vice Chair Joseph Perrello asked, “How much was it?”

Buck replied, “That one was only $5,000…to date we’ve had $214,000 worth of fraudulent checks.”

Perrello inquired, “Nancy, if these are vendors we use all of the time, why not use automatic deposits instead of checks?”

Buck replied, “we’re looking into ACH [Automatic Clearing House, a payment system that offers direct deposit] right now to start the payroll vendors that we have to pay out.”

Buck said some of the more recent fraudulent checks have been sloppy because the criminals changed the name and the dollar amount but not the vendor number. “So we don’t know what happened but we know that it was stolen somehow from this vendor.” 

Buck said there were several checks that were changed from this vendor in the last couple of days. 

“So we’ve had [fraudulent checks] from our ACC (Adult Care Center), Mortgage Tax, DFS, Payroll, General Fund, County Health, and County Road- that’s all the accounts [from which] they’ve stolen.” 

To protect the Treasurer’s accounts, Buck said she is trying to get her banking partners to use Positive Pay, a fraud protection program offered by financial institutions to detect and prevent check and ACH payment fraud. “18 [fraudulent checks] in the last week were caught through Positive Pay,” said Buck. 

Buck’s report to the Management and Budget Committee ended with a personal recommendation to Sullivan County residents: “I check my personal bank and credit card account every day because I know that I’ve been compromised.”

“It’s pretty scary out there so I watch my personal information everyday,” Buck said, “and I recommend if you don’t, you do start doing that.”