The History of SAFEChecks

"Necessity is the Mother of Invention."

SAFEChecks began in 1994 as a division of a California-based business bank. In the early 1990s, the bank began experiencing an enormous number of fraudulent checks paying against its corporate customers' accounts. Over a three-consecutive-year period, the bank witnessed fraudulent check attempts increase from $90,000 to over $3,000,000. Many of the fraudulent checks were perfect replications of its customers' actual checks.

Greg Litster, then Senior Vice President and head of the bank's Financial Services Division, called in the bank's primary vendors and made a simple request: "Provide our business customers with checks that forgers cannot replicate or alter."

These vendors included some of the largest check printers in the nation, yet none of them offered a secure check. Even worse, none were actively working on such a check.

With fraud losses mounting, something had to be done, and quickly. Mr. Litster hired world-renowned consultant and check fraud expert Frank Abagnale, a one-time master forger, to assist the bank in this fight against forgers. (Mr. Abagnale is Special Advisor to the FBI's Financial Crimes Unit and has consulted with hundreds of major banks and corporations around the world.) Mr. Litster worked with Mr. Abagnale to strengthen the bank's internal controls and in 1994 they set out to develop a new check that forgers could not replicate. That check, in a myriad of styles and colors but with identical safety features, became SAFEChecks. Over the next three years, Mr. Litster caused the bank's corporate customers to switch to this new check. Fraud attempts and losses began to drop immediately. By the end of 1996, check fraud attempts at the bank fell to $120,000, a decrease of 96 percent from 1993 levels.

Recognizing both a growing national need and an opportunity, Mr. Litster acquired the division from the bank in 1997, and today is its Chief Executive Officer. Always on the leading edge in the fight against fraud, SAFEChecks is already on its third-generation check.

SAFEChecks. America's most secure check. There is no safer check on the market.