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The printed bank deposit slip is becoming scarce as more and more people receive payments through direct deposits and use automated teller machines which do not require such paperwork. But before all these means of electronic bookkeeping were established, a typical Friday ritual for most working folk was to trudge to the local bank with one's paycheck, fill out a deposit slip, and stand in line to deposit the check. Some people used the deposit slips that were furnished with their checkbooks and had their account numbers already printed on them, but those who didn't carry deposit slips with them (such as customers who had only savings accounts) typically used the blank slips provided by their banks in every branch office. Banks preferred that their customers use pre-printed slips, because those slips included the customers' account numbers printed in the machine-readable magnetic ink used by their data processing systems and could be sorted automatically, but slips lacking printed account numbers were singled out by the machines for manual sorting. (As well, when customers had to fill in their own account numbers on deposit slips, they sometimes got them wrong, wrote them illegibly, or forgot to include them at all.) If a deposit slip should somehow include both a printed account number and a handwritten one, the sorting machines would process it based solely on the printed number, which supposedly gave rise to an ingenious scam: Con man Frank W. Abagnale (of Catch Me If You Can fame) claimed in his memoirs that he successfully pulled off this scam: However, many of the alleged cons that Abagnale allegedly pulled off, as chronicled in Catch Me If You Can, proved unverifiable, and Abagnale ackowledged that the book's co-author over dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. The book appears to contain recitations of a number of putative scams that Abagnale or his co-author merely heard about anecdotally and falsely incorporated in the book as real-life incidents. If it was ever perpetrated in the real world, this scheme is unlikely to have worked for very long. Bank customers would soon have started inquiring about their missing deposits, and the errant checks would quickly have been traced to the scammer's account. Once that happened, the scammer's account would have been flagged so that any further transactions would trigger additional scrutiny, thereby exposing the scam in short order.
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