According to Donald Knuth:
Leading banks and investment funds have been foundering, because of bad debts and lack of trust; and other, less well-known kinds of fiscal chaos are also on the horizon. For example, due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write personal checks [boldface in original]. A criminal who sees the [routing and account] numbers that are printed at the bottom of any check that you write can use that information to withdraw all the money from your account. He or she can do this in various ways, without even knowing your name --- for example by creating an ATM card, or by impersonating a bank in some country of the world where safeguards are minimal, or by printing a document that looks like a check. The account number and routing information are all that international financial institutions look at before deciding to transfer funds from one account to another. (See, for example, Grant Bugher's comments.) More and more criminals are learning about this easy way to acquire money, and devising new schemes to conceal their identities as they steal the assets of more victims.
He goes on to describe having written 275 checks between 2006 and 2008 (to people who find errors in his books), and states that he can no longer do this with real money because he's had to close three checking accounts.
Is Dr. Knuth correct in claiming that personal checks are unsafe?
We've previously discussed whether bank account numbers are safe to post publicly, and the answer seems to be "no." I would assume this makes it unsafe to write checks to random people as well (since in the US, checks include routing and account numbers), but I would like to see if any banks (or other people) have studied this or issued recommendations.
