That is kind of scary. If some dug through my trash and found a torn up voided check they could withdraw my whole account. I don't really have enough money to hire lawyers and I'm not sure what police could do and besides I'd be broke.
>I don't really have enough money to hire lawyers and I'm not sure what police could do and besides I'd be broke.
You would call your bank and they would reverse it. You would have your money back in a business day or two. That's why ACH isn't "abused".
What would be more worrying if some multinational company accidentally debited your account. That would be harder because your bank would likely just side with the multinational who inadvertently stole your money. However, I don't think that is a weakness that exists solely with ACH.
About 15 years ago a company kept taking money out of my checking account via ACH every two weeks. It was a large, well-known company, but I had never done business with them. I contacted them and the only answer I could get was "well, if we have your information, you must have authorized it, so I can't help you. Besides, you don't have an account with us, so I can't stop it."
dafuq?
So I went to my local bank branch during lunch and explained the situation. The bank manager told me that she could stop it immediately, and reverse all the transactions to date, but since it was recurring, the only way she could block future transactions (outside a 6-month window) would be to close my account and open another one.
We agreed to do that.
Literally as she was going through the process, another of these phantom debits showed up.
Got all my money back, had to change checking account #'s and never found out how it happened. I can only assume that the next time PayChex tried to debit my account and it bounced, they figured out their mistake.
But hey, thanks for the absolutely useless customer support! I guess it only works if you're actually a customer.
Not really, they couldn't if you pay attention to what happens to your account. First of all, they'd have to gain access to ACH initiator - for which criminals do have some, but it's not likely those will be easy to access to a random trash digger. Those have non-trivial costs to establish and easy to burn and get prosecuted. And, ACH transactions are reversible for a long time, so unless you're in a coma, you keep your money at the cost of some inconvenience and some waste of time. You won't need any lawyers for that, unless a) you have an extremely shitty bank that's not afraid to lose their banking license, or b) you want to do more than getting your money back for some reason.
If they have access to a very quick and efficient cash out system, they might offload the costs onto some chump (see various "cashback" scams) but it's not trivial to make this scheme work. It can work, so shredding your voided checks is highly recommended, but it's not as trivial as finding the check, coming to a bank and saying "I'm that guy it says here, give me all my money now, in small bills please".
