As we've welcomed in the new decade, it seems a hot topic of conversation is a warning about how you shouldn’t abbreviate the year 2020 on any legal or professional documents, including financial ones. Abbreviating the year 2020 to just 20 leaves the door open for potential scammers to follow it up with any two digits and change the timeline of the document entirely. This leaves you vulnerable to fraud.
For example, let’s say you wrote a check to someone and filled in the date as 1/1/20. Experts say a scammer could get ahold of it and change the date to 1/1/2021, making a stale check active again early next year.
While some websites claim this to be just a myth, most news organizations are reporting this to be a legitimate concern. After all, criminals are always looking for new ways to alter information in order to exploit unsuspecting people. And I’m a firm believer in always erring on the side of caution, especially when it comes to your finances.
So as you break the habit of writing 19, let’s make sure you safely replace it with the entire four digit number year of the new decade, 2020!