banking security?

Something incredibly unbelievable happened last week. Two cheques issued with the wrong signatories went through the banking system without a single question asked by anyone.

The bank did not question and the cheques were cleared. The person coordinating the signing of cheques who discovered afterwards that he got the wrong person to sign for the cheques didn't do anything to put a stop to the transactions before they were cleared by the bank. The person in charge of managing the account did not even stop to think that something wasn't quite right when he saw the unauthorised transactions reflected on the statement.

I, who had nothing whatsoever to do with this, had alarms going off in my head. Besides not being able to understand why nobody realised anything was amiss, I was also worried (very worried) by the fact that banks here allow transactions to go through without verifying the authorising signatories. A quick check with the bank subsequently showed that they apparently don't verify the signatures on every single cheque - I'm not sure how true that is though. I was told that they usually only do thorough checks for transactions above a certain amount.

In Singapore, even a cheque for $50 has to go through a signature matching and verification process before clearing. I once issued a cheque that bounced because my signature was inconsistent with what was shown on my records.

Not too long ago, someone somehow managed to put through multiple transactions amounting to quite a considerable sum of money on my credit card. At around that same time, a colleague's bank account was accessed by a complete stranger who managed to withdraw funds without authorisation. And now, the cheque incident. I don't feel secure here at all.