What if someone said “I’ll pay you for your checking account number.” Would you give that person your information? Probably not.
But a similar question just came up in a conversation with a friend: should you be careful about accepting checks from just anybody? Everyone who writes you a check gets your checking account number and routing number printed on the back of their canceled check. I have a nice PDF from my bank with all of my canceled check images in it.
I think the best course of action is to only give checks to people or organizations that you trust to 1) not abuse your account, and 2) not let your account numbers be discovered by anyone else. That second one is a pretty high bar.
As for myself, I’m switching to credit card for everything I can. Checks suck.
Incidentally, this is exactly the kind of thing that PhoneFactor would be great for.
Why is it that people are still using checks for moneytary transactions? Here in Iceland we are well on the way of eliminating checks and paper money, 90% of moneytary transactions are done through electronic transactions, debet or credit cards. This process started in the early 1990’s when banks started charging a higher fee for transactions with checks than all other kinds. At the start the banks charged 250 ISK for each check you wrote plus the fee for the checkbook and 9 ISK (now its 15 ISK) for each debit card transaction (although ATM transactions are free) while the credit card transactions and electronic transactions are free. So it is in everybody’s interest to use online banking and debet/credit cards. And so we probably have a very fast, convenient and secure system for moving money around.
There are separate problems with Debit cards, resulting from differences in US law between credit and debit transactions. A US consumer advocacy group recently recommended ditching Debit cards entirely because of the risk that someone could steal your debit card number and then steal all of your cash pretty much instantly.
Most debit cards have some protections against this sort of thing, but credit cards have been around longer and are generally believed to be a little safer, due to stronger consumer protections.