Hawk, an AI-powered fraud detection platform, has published an in-depth conversation between its vice president of product, fraud, Hrishi Talwar, and Mitek senior business intelligence and strategy manager Derek Abbott, exploring how check fraud has evolved and what financial institutions must do to keep pace.
The piece, framed as a dialogue between the two companies, comes on the back of a partnership between Hawk and Mitek to deliver an AI-powered solution designed to help financial institutions proactively identify and block altered, forged, or counterfeit checks before losses occur. The collaboration combines Mitek’s image forensics and consortium intelligence with Hawk’s AI-powered precision and self-serve rule management.
At the heart of the conversation is a stark warning: check fraud has fundamentally changed. What was once a slow, paper-based crime has become a fast-moving, organised, and increasingly AI-enabled threat.
Abbott outlined several shifts driving this evolution, including a surge in high-quality counterfeit and altered items created using inexpensive image-manipulation tools, industrialised mail theft, stolen check reselling via online criminal marketplaces, and so-called channel hopping — where fraudsters move between mobile, ATM, and in-branch deposits to exploit weaker defences.
Abbott also identified three emerging techniques that institutions should watch closely: AI-assisted counterfeit checks, where generative tools are used to recreate checks with near-perfect typography and signatures; synthetic entity and check pairing, where fraudsters open fake business accounts matching a stolen check’s payee name to bypass Positive Pay controls; and high-velocity deposit attacks, where the same stolen check is deposited across multiple institutions within hours.
Current prevention systems, Abbott argued, are failing to keep up. Most fraud tools were designed for a world where checks cleared overnight and visual alterations were rudimentary. Today’s gaps include limited image-based analysis, siloed data, batch-oriented processing, high false-positive rates, and a lack of cross-channel visibility. Critically, most systems are unable to detect emerging and synthetic fraud patterns that only become visible when activity is analysed across institutions and channels.
Mitek’s approach, as described by Abbott, seeks to address these shortcomings through a cloud-hosted consortium spanning demand deposit accounts from more than 8,300 US financial institutions. Unlike traditional consortiums that share only metadata, Mitek’s system analyses high-fidelity visual attributes and image forensics, covering both on-us and in-transit fraud across all deposit channels, including mobile, ATM, in-branch, and remote deposit capture.
Looking ahead, Abbott described a future where fraud prevention shifts from reactive detection to anticipatory defence, with always-on intelligence networks, deeper integration of compromised data intelligence, and explainable AI providing transparent reasoning behind alerts.
Mitek senior business intelligence and strategy manager Derek Abbott said, “Today’s check fraud is moving faster and operating at far greater scale than ever before.”
Abbott added, “Fraudsters collaborate; banks must too. Shared intelligence means a check flagged at one institution can be immediately recognized at another, closing the window for redeposit schemes and cross-institution attacks. Without consortium data, you’re fighting fraud with one hand tied behind your back.”
On the evolution of AI capabilities, Abbott said, “Modern AI can now analyze a number of visual attributes of a check in seconds, far beyond account metadata alone… It can detect subtle manipulations, from mismatched handwriting to tampered MICR lines to micro-distortions invisible to human reviewers.”
For more insights, read the full interview here.
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