Abbreviations may seem like an easy way to save yourself time and look cool AF, but officials are warning everyone about a new type of abbreviation that could have costly and very uncool repercussions. It's the year 2020, and while it is incredibly tempting to refer to this year as simply '20' when writing out a date, this sort of laziness could make you a target for fraud.
When writing out dates this year, the NYPD and other fraud experts are urging people to write out the full year, as tedious as that sounds. For example, date your check for your share of the dinner bill 1/6/2020, not 1/6/20. Why? Because some grifter could add, say, a 19 to the end of that 20, changing the intended year to 2019 and then BOOM. They own all your money from last year? "Scammers could use this change to try and cash an old check or forge an unpaid debt," CBS reports.
CNN spoke with Ira Rheingold, executive director for the National Association of Consumer Advocates, and shed more light on how this scam could play out:
If you have an old check lying around that's dated 1/4/20 and someone finds it, they could add "21" to the end of that date, and voila, the check is no longer stale. Or, let's say you sign a credit contract — an agreement between a borrower and a lender — and date it 1/4/20. Say you then miss a month or two of payments, and the lender goes to collect the debt that's owed. Theoretically, they could add "19" to the end of that date and argue that you owe more than a year's worth of payments, Rheingold said.
Now you may be wondering what even is a "check"? Let NerdWallet explain.
Maybe in the future someone will build a smartphone app that lets you just pay people directly without paper, but until that day make sure you put a little more effort into your check writing. And would it kill you to add a cute Memo line?
