Sucks to hear the banks willing-lack of involvement with things like this. You'd think, responsibility-wise, if you see some shady person hanging around trying to cash checks that *obviously* aren't theirs, that you could alert the authorities easily. I guess from their perspective it's more "trouble" than it's worth. It just seems irresponsible to me though.
That said, my in-laws changed their account number but that doesn't mean this won't happen again, especially if it's someone they know. They suspect it might be one of the vendors whom they write checks out to - how else could someone have cloned one of their checks so closely? My father in law told the bank not to accept any checks written out to "cash" ever. You'd think all places would *never* cash out a check written to cash - that's the hugest red flag ever. If I'm an account holder and I want cash, why would I write a check to cash vs just straight up withdrawing the cash. There's no reason I can think of that writing a check to cash should ever be a valid type of transaction to process.