This week on the perfect scam.

At least 2,600 mail carriers were attacked nationwide,

with at least 170 arrow keys stolen.

You just rob you let a carrier, gain access to a blue collection box or a relay box, and boom, you have thousands of dollars.

We're not talking about a single person, a single criminal targeting mail carrier for the aerial.

Because we're talking about very sophisticated crime groups.

Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host Bob Sullivan. There's a lot of focus

on high-tech crime nowadays, artificial intelligence, deepfakes, hackers, and all that is important.

But there's an old-fashioned crime that's been making a dramatic comeback lately,

and people all over the fraud world are ringing alarm bills about it.

Check washing.

Stealing a check out of the mail, washing off the payee and other information,

then cashing the check and stealing money from the check owner's account.

This crime has been updated with some high-tech elements,

but also there's some really troubling violence too,

particularly targeting male carriers.

The U.S. Treasury Department says check washing has basically doubled in the past year and

800 million dollars has been stolen from consumer accounts, while most consumers

eventually get their money back from the bank.

It can take much, much longer than a typical case of credit or debit card fraud. Now this might all

seem strange since Americans write far, far fewer checks today than they did in the past, a good 80% less than they did in 1990, but that's part of the reason

check fraud is now thriving, something Nashville resident Mark McPherson learned the hard way recently.

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