‘Nobody wants to talk about it,’ bank CFO sounds alarm on terrifying issue draining $136M a year from customer accounts

A BANK’S top official has warned of scams that have drained $136 million from customer accounts so far this year.

Regions Financial, based in Birmingham, Alabama, told Wall Street analysts that the bank had been affected by two scams in 2023.

“It’s hitting everybody,” David Turner, the Chief Financial Officer of Regions Financial, said at a conference in November.

“It’s just not hitting them enough where they need to have the kind of public discourse readout because nobody wants to talk about it.”

One scam that affected Regions Financial bankers involved criminals stealing checks.

The banks had been offering customers quicker access to funds deposited to their accounts from checks.

So thieves began stealing checks to gain access to money sooner.

The theft went undetected for so long that the bank’s fraud costs are expected to double this year.

So far, Regions Financial has amassed $136 million in fraud costs in 2023.

“We opened the door too wide, bad people came rushing in, and we didn’t close the door timely enough,” Turner said, per The New York Times.

“What happens is they get on the dark web and they start talking to each other, and they just overwhelm the system.”

Criminal justice professor David Maimon told The New York Times that criminals steal the checks using code words.

The pandemic saw higher numbers of stolen checks circulating, he said.

In September, Maimon’s research group at Georgia State University found that 9,148 stolen checks were circulating.

That number was up from the 4,527 they found in February.

In 2022, Americans wrote about 1.5 monthly checks, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta survey.

That number is down from the 3.1 checks Americans averaged per month in 2015.