Personal Checks In Stolen Church Offering

When the New Vintage Church in Santa Rosa, California, moved its Sunday service to the larger pastures of Santa Rosa's performing arts center on January 10, its entire offering was stolen.

More than 1,000 worshippers attended that service, according to a Santa Rosa Press Democrat story about the church to run that same Sunday. Any number of these 1,000 worshippers could have written checks, which the church’s e-mail advised its members to cancel.

What irks me is that the church sent out e-mails asking everyone to "re-contribute" and cancel their missing checks, send in cash again if they paid cash, etc. There was NOT ONE MENTION OF POTENTIAL FOR IDENTITY THEFT or what to do about it!

If members of the congregation put checks in the offering bags, they should do more than cancel their offering checks. They should also cancel their accounts and start new ones … Or, at the least, put an alert on their accounts.

After all, anyone who steals from a church has no compunctions about using the church members' checks to steal money and credit off those accounts. It’s reasonable to assume that the account and personal information on those checks is more valuable than the $1’s, $5’s, $10’s (and the rare $20) they’re likely to find in the offering bags.

In addition to offering identity protection advice to its constituents, this church’s leadership also needs to get more security savvy. (Holding church in a public performing arts center presents its own set of challenges.) And church ushers responsible for those offering bags had better undergo training.

Comments

[Micah Foster]

yeah, it was incredibly poor planning and things have greatly improved with our security, including off-duty police and security patrol

the bright side of the story is that people came from the community to support us that had no connection with God...and now they are a valued part of our church community

also, there have been no problems with identity theft and the only money that was lost was the cash, the checks were all cancelled and nobody has had a problem with their accounts - only by the grace of God

just wanted to give a short update