Even as digital transformation accelerates, check fraud detection remains a critical challenge for financial institutions. As paper check volumes have declined, fraudsters have adapted their activities to digital channels, often exploiting gaps between deposit channels and disparate detection systems. Siloed approaches leave opportunities for exploitation, no matter whether a check enters through mobile remote deposit capture (mRDC), an ATM, or a teller window.
For the technology and risk management leaders at financial institutions, this illustrates a critical truth: effective check fraud prevention requires unified defenses across every channel. A fragmented defense model can’t keep pace with fraudsters; it won’t be able to deliver real-time fraud prevention, nor can it leverage cross-channel fraud analysis to reveal emerging threat patterns. Unified visibility and unified action are strategic requirements to achieve resilience now and in the future.
The hidden risks of fragmented check fraud detection
At many banks fraud detection systems are still siloed. There may be one system for mobile deposits, another for ATMs and yet another for branch operations. While each of these solutions may have efficacy in its own domain, the lack of communication across these systems results in gaps that sophisticated fraud rings are able to exploit.
For example, a check that was flagged as fraudulent on the mobile channel might be presented at a branch hours later, where it might pass manual inspection and be accepted if the teller has no record of its previous rejection - or a stolen or altered item that’s scanned at an ATM might not be held to the institution’s mRDC standards. In both of these scenarios, it’s clear that channel fragmentation makes an institution more vulnerable to fraud.
Disconnected systems create unnecessary and unhelpful complexity within an institution’s architecture, result in decisions made with incomplete information by individuals and systems across the institution, and impede scalability. For CTOs and other operational leaders, consolidating to a unified check fraud detection platform results in reduced complexity, easier updates, faster intelligence sharing, and greater control over and consistency of the use of risk signals throughout the entire enterprise.
Check fraud – the growing threat
Check fraud is still one of the highest-loss categories for financial institutions, even though digital payments have widely supplanted the use of checks. According to a 2025 industry survey, almost two-thirds of organizations experienced attempted check fraud in 2024. Overall, check fraud accounted for approximately 30% of total payment fraud losses – second only to the losses from debit card fraud. In 2025, the trendline is continuing upward, as fraudsters find ways to exploit digital and physical vulnerabilities.
One driver of the expansion is mobile check deposit fraud on mobile- and image-enabled channels. Mobile check deposit fraud is often orchestrated by organized fraud rings, which can attempt to submit altered or duplicate items across multiple institutions and channels in rapid succession.
Mail-theft-driven schemes, which were once seen as low-tech, are also growing. Hundreds of millions of dollars in suspicious activity have been tied to stolen checks, including check-washing scams where the payee and/or amount are altered on a check stolen from the mail.
It’s clear from these numbers that even as digital technology takes over much of the payment ecosystem, checks remain a viable option for fraudsters. Institutions that are reliant on disconnected systems will find themselves exposed to significant losses due to the inability to correlate events quickly enough to stop losses related to exposure on multiple channels.
How fraudsters exploit channel gaps
A quick look at recent criminal investigations illustrates how fraudsters have been able to exploit weaknesses between deposit entry points.
In one example, in early 2025, a US Mail theft ring was charged with the orchestration of a $5.3 million dollar fraud scheme that involved altering checks and subsequently cycling them through multiple banks and channels to attempt to evade detection.
In another scam, which was widely popularized via viral social media posts, users were encouraged to deposit counterfeit checks via ATM and withdraw the funds before reversal, which cost major institutions hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And, in another scam in Texas, a coordinated group of fraudsters used forged checks and counterfeit IDs in an attempt to cash tens of thousands of dollars in forged checks at bank branches and ATMs within minutes of one another.
These are just a few examples, but they all illustrate the same pattern: multi-channel execution of transactions in quick succession, in an attempt to evade detection across systems within an institution. When institutions had unified, real-time fraud prevention platforms, they were able to detect these cross-channel fraud patterns early enough to prevent significant losses. Institutions that relied on isolated systems more often only identified the activity after funds had cleared.
Why unified check fraud detection is the future of fraud prevention
Unified, all-channel fraud detection offers operational efficacy and strategic defenses for financial institutions, improving their ability to manage digital and physical deposits at scale. The key to effective deterrence is shifting from isolated efforts toward real-time, AI-powered fraud detection tools that are capable of correlating activity across every entry point to every channel.
A unified approach should include:
- Channel-agnostic analysis: every check image, regardless of its capture source, is evaluated using the same detection logic
- Real-time decisioning: advanced models that are capable of identifying a counterfeit, altered, or duplicate item before posting, rather than after
- Cross-channel fraud analytics: the use of behavioral signals and image fingerprints to flag checks that appear across multiple deposit attempts
- Industry-wide intelligence sharing: participation in consortium data networks (link this blog) to identify known fraudulent items, repeat offenders, and emergent fraud trends
- Simplified infrastructure: easy-to-implement platforms with fewer consoles and APIs, streamlined workflows, and capabilities for consistent rule application that results in stronger compliance and auditability
With a unified approach to fraud detection, the result is not just overall improved efficacy, but also greater operational visibility and the ability to respond in a more agile fashion to emergent threat patterns.
To counter these risks, institutions are turning to unified, real-time fraud detection systems that connect every channel into a single defense.
Check Fraud Defender: enterprise-grade, all-channel protection
Mitek’s Check Fraud Defender was purpose-built to solve these problems. The Check Fraud Defender platform integrates deposits on all channels into a single, unified, and AI-powered fraud detection environment. No matter whether the deposit is with a teller, at an ATM, or via mRDC, all transactions are analyzed in real-time, with the use of cross-channel fraud analytics that are capable of detecting duplicate or altered items before funds move, not after.
Check Fraud Defender also connects to a consortium of more than 8,300 financial institutions. Through the consortium model, each member benefits from shared intelligence that amplifies detection accuracy and accelerates real-time decision-making, limiting the ability for fraudsters to target multiple institutions at the same time.
Through unified architecture and real-time defense, institutions that implement Check Fraud Defender see a measurable reduction in losses and improvements in operational efficiency.
Strategic takeaway – building a unified fraud defense
In an environment where fraudsters have networks of information that allow them to move fast, institutions need the infrastructure that lets them move even faster. The institutions best positioned to address the next wave of emergent check fraud trends will be those that have built systems with unified fraud detection capabilities at their foundation. Combining AI-powered analytics, real-time decisioning, and cross-channel visibility makes it possible to transform fraud detection into a proactive institutional capability, not a reactive function after losses have already been realized.
With Check Fraud Defender, financial institutions can now consolidate their disparate fraud detection systems into a cohesive and unified defense that protects them and their customers on every deposit channel, every time. This reduces their fraud risk today, and builds more resilient, future-proof fraud management architecture for addressing threats tomorrow.
