Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Can't the account information on my checks be easily used for fraud?
That's accurate.  Here is another risk with the current checking system, which many people are not aware of: Anyone who knows your checking account number can learn what your balance in that account is.  (This is bank-specific, but it is possible at the major banks I've checked.) How does that work?  Many banks have a phone line where you can dial up and interact with an automated voice response system, for various customer service tasks.  One of the options is something like "merchant check verification".  That option is intended to help a merchant who receives a check to verify whether the person writing the check has enough money in their account for the check to clear.  If you select that option in the phone tree, it will prompt you to enter in the account number on the check and the amount of the check, and then it will respond by telling you either "there are currently sufficient funds in the account to cash this check" or "there are not sufficient funds; this check would bounce". Here's how you can abuse this system to learn how much someone has in their bank account, if you know their account number.  You call up and check whether they've enough money to cash a $10,000 check (note that you don't actually have to have a check for $10,000 in your hands; you just need to know the account number).  If the system says "nope, it'd bounce", then you call again and try $5,000.  If the system says "yup, sufficient funds for a $5,000 check", then you try $7,500.  If it says "nope, not enough for that", you try $6,250.  Etcetera.  At each step, you narrow the range of possible account balances by a factor of two.  Consequently, after about a dozen or so steps, you will likely know their balance to within a few dollars.  (Computer scientists know this procedure by the name "binary search".  The rest of us may recognize it as akin to a game of "20 questions".) If this bothers you, you may be able to protect your self by calling up your bank and asking them how to prevent it.  When I talked to my bank (Bank of America), they told me they could put a fraud alert flag on your account, which would disable the merchant check verification service for my account.  It does mean that I have to provide a 3-digit PIN any time I phone up my bank, but that's fine with me. I realize many folks may terribly not be concerned about revealing their bank account balance, so in the grand scheme of things, this risk may be relatively minor.  However, I thought I'd document it here for others to be aware of.