Writing checks may seem like an outdated way to pay for things, but plenty of people still use them.
More than 14.5 billion checks, totaling $25.8 trillion, were written in 2018, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest payments study. And while that number has decreased by about 7% every year since 2015, debit and credit card payments aren’t as ubiquitous as many of us think.
In an era of identity theft and bank fraud, American’s long-standing relationship with their checkbooks begs the question: How safe is this 20th-century payment method?