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Comment by dtran | Hacker News Reader

From their about faq page: How do I deposit checks? Take a photo of the check with your smart phone and send it to us with our app. Pretty simple, right?

Is this really secure? I know there are some people doing cardreaders as an attachment to the phone, but pictures of checks?

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USAA lets you deposit scanned check images. The only requirement is that you have to have a credit card setup as overdraft protection. Decent photos seem like they'd work ok.

So do you think we'll move away from paper checks completely and just move around echecks from phone to phone? I've never really understood how checks are secure. They just have a routing number, an account number, and your signature right?

Cheques are earth-shatteringly non-secure. The entire system runs on trust. I've had a several-months-post-dated cheque I wrote cashed by a bank and accepted by mine without apparently as much as a look at the date field. (They also dinged me an overdraft fee. Reversed that when I complained, but not the cheque withdrawal itself.) A while back, there was a pretty loud story about an payday-advance business suing the maker of a subsequently cancelled cheque for the money and winning the amount.

The sooner North America weans itself off cheques and external for-profit inter-bank transfer systems (Paypal, grrr), the better off we'll be.

Yes. The technical requirements for a piece of commercial paper---sometimes called a "negotiable instrument," or a check---are that it be a writing, payable to the order of someone specific or simply the bearer, that it be signed by the maker or drawer, that it be for a sum certain, that it be unconditional, that it be payable on demand, and that it be payable in currency.

Technically, you can make a valid check out of a napkin with a Sharpie.

USAA's iPhone app has been doing this for a while: https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=deposi...

They also have an Android app.

There's no reason it can't be if the app is well-implemented (though this is a big if). I suppose it opens up a concern about phone malware, but with checks that's pretty much the least of your problems. It's not like they're terribly secure to begin with.

I imagine it's as secure as the USAA method of doing it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/technology/10check.html

Its like Check 21 I guess .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_21_Act

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