Check fraud is escalating markedly Americans are warned not to mail checks if possible. By KEN SWEET - Associated Press Early in the pandemic, government relief checks became an enticing target for thieves. The problem has only gotten worse.

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Check fraud is back in a big way, fueled by a rise in organized crime that is forcing small businesses and individuals to take additional safety measures or to avoid sending checks through the mail altogether.

Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, last year. That's up from 350,000 reports in 2021. Meanwhile the U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, more than double the prior year's total.

Early in the pandemic, government relief checks became an attractive target for criminals. The problem has only grown worse, and postal authorities and bank officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks if possible, or at least to use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office.

Meanwhile, as the cases of fraud increase, victims are waiting longer to recover their stolen money.

Check usage has been in decline for decades as Americans have largely switched to paying for their services with credit and debit cards.

Americans wrote roughly 3.4 billion checks in 2022, down from nearly 19 billion checks in 1990, according to the Federal Reserve. However, the average size of the checks Americans write rose from $673 in 1990 — or $1,602 in today's dollars — to $2,652 last year.

"Despite the declining use of checks in the United States, criminals have been increasingly targeting the U.S. Mail since the COVID-19 pandemic to commit check fraud," Fin- CEN wrote in an alert sent out in February.

Checks are still frequently used by small businesses.

Eric Fischgrund, who runs FischTank PR, a 30-person public-relations firm in New York, had about 15 checks that were being mailed to him from clients stolen after they all went through the same Postal Service distribution center. Ten of them were successfully cashed by criminals.

The checks were stolen in March and Fischgrund became aware of the problem in April, when several of his clients who were never late missed payments. The Postal Service investigated and Fischgrund has recovered about 70% of the revenue, but some of the cases haven't yet been resolved.

According to the investigator on the case, the perpetrators used technology that melted ink in the "to" field of the checks so they could write in fake names. FischTank instructed all its clients to change their paper format because it was dealing with a check-fraud issue.

Fischgrund said he had never previously had an issue with check fraud in the nearly 10 years he has run his own business. Now he has a clause in invoices and new client contracts that asks for electronic payments only.

"I don't think we'll ever go back to asking for checks as an option," he said.

Today's check-fraud criminals are not small operations, or lone individuals like the Leonardo DiCaprio character in the 2002 movie "Catch Me If You Can," counterfeiting checks from his hotel room and apartment.

They are sophisticated criminal operations, with participants infiltrating post office distribution centers, setting up fake businesses or creating fake IDs to deposit the checks. "Walkers," or people who actually walk in to cash these checks, receive training in how to appear even more legitimate.

In one case in California last year, nearly 60 people were arrested on charges of committing more than $5 million in check fraud against 750 people.

Criminals are getting the checks or identification information by fishing mail out of U.S. postal boxes, looking for envelopes that appear to be either bill payments or checks being mailed.

The most common type of check fraud is what's known as check washing, where a criminal steals the check and proceeds to change the payee's name on the check and, additionally, the amount of money.

Some criminals are going further and using the information found on a check to gather sensitive personal data on a potential victim.

There have been reports of criminals creating fake entities out of personal data obtained from a check, or even opening new lines of credit or businesses with that data as well.

This allows fraudsters to create new checks using old account data.

That's why check-fraud experts are saying Americans should avoid sending checks in the mail or at least take additional safety steps to avoid becoming a victim.

"If you need to mail a check, do not put a check in your residential mailbox and raise the flag to notify the [postal worker.] Drop off checks inside a post office," said Todd Robertson with Argo Data, a financial data provider.

Banks, keenly aware of the problem, are increasingly watching for signs of fraud at branches and through mobile check deposit services, including large check deposits.

They are training branch employees to take steps such as looking at check numbers, because checks are typically written in order, or noticing when a check is being written for a much larger amount than the customer's previous history would indicate.

Banks also now deploy software at their branches that can tell how risky a check might be.

But those systems become moot if criminals are able to persuade tellers — often at the front lines for check acceptance — to look past any red flags.

"These fraudsters are much more aggressive than they were in the past, and they are pressuring tellers to override internal systems that might flag a potentially suspicious transaction," Paul Benda, a senior vice president at the American Bankers Association.

Banks generally reimburse customers if they are victims of check fraud within days.

However, due to the growing number of fraud cases, refunds have slowed down in recent months. In March, a trio of Democratic senators asked the banking industry to be more prompt in reimbursing victims of check fraud whenever possible.

Another safety tip for businesses is to opt in to a bank's "positive pay" services with a business checking account. Positive pay means you preauthorize checks for a certain amount as well as the check number, cutting down criminals' ability to wash the check and withdraw money for an amount that isn't pre-authorized.

Staging your home can sell it quicker and for more. Here's how to hire a pro ​ Even though it's still technically a seller's market, staging your home for sale might still be a worthwhile investment.  By Jim Buchta Star Tribune   JUNE 11, 2023 — 2:00PM Laurie Fleming stood in the warehouse of her home staging company Fix Design Haus in Plymouth on June 5.

You love your house and have invested much time and money into making it just the way you want it.

But now it's time to sell, and your real estate agent advises undoing all that work. Neutralize it so someone else can imagine living there.

That can be upsetting for a seller to hear, but it's the not-so-secret strategy for selling a house quickly and for the highest price: home staging.

"The way that we live and the way that we sell are two different things, especially in today's world," said Kris Lindahl, founder of Kris Lindahl Real Estate (KLRE) and a proponent of staging.

Even though it's still a seller's market in the Twin Cities, staging your home might still be a worthwhile strategy to consider. Here's some advice on how to do it:

​ What is staging?

Laurie Fleming collects a blanket for a future staging project for a client.

​Staging isn't just decorating or interior design. While many stagers have degrees and years of experience in those fields, staging is a very specific craft — some say art — that's focused on making a home as sellable as possible. Staging can be as simple as decluttering and depersonalizing a house while you're still living there.

But it can also mean painting, replacing fixtures and cabinet hardware, even installing new appliances. You can also swap your furnishings and accessories for more on-trend and neutral items.

​Some stagers just tell sellers what to do. Others actually do the work. Twin Cities-based Laurie Fleming of Fix Design Haus has a 12,000-square-foot warehouse full of furnishings and accessories she's constantly moving in and out of homes.

"Staging is an insurance policy to know that I'm doing everything I can to get top dollar in my sale and that I can't control other factors, including mortgage rates and home prices," she said. "At its core, staging is all about solving problems that buyers might find objectionable."

Why it matters
While stagers themselves are reluctant to guarantee a quick sale or make promises about your return on investment, there is some proof of staging's benefits from a national survey the National Association of Realtors released this spring.

Almost half of the sellers' agents surveyed said staging a home made it sell more quickly. One-fifth of both buyers' and sellers' agents said staged houses fetched an offer that was 1% to 5% higher than similar unstaged homes.

Almost a quarter of the sellers' agents said they staged all sellers' homes before listing them for sale, while 10% said they only staged homes that were difficult to sell.

Most agents said real estate television shows — think "House Hunters" on HGTV — affected buyers' perspectives on homes. Three quarters of the respondents said those TV shows affected their business by setting unrealistic or increased expectations.

Martha Stewart and Chip and Joanna Gaines have pretty much ruined it for home sellers these days. Buyers want what they see, no matter their budget. They don't want to see your stuff or any sign of you and your beautiful family or any trace of your fluffy dog or cuddly cat.

"You're so house-blind when you live there, and you don't see what other people see, and you're able to look past your collections," Fleming said. "And we know how to make a house look newer than it is."

Lindahl said buyers are so discriminating that hiring a professional stager is essential.

"I don't even think it's an option. I think it's something you must do," he said. "Everyone's house, including mine, doesn't look like a showhouse when I'm living it."

Lindahl said nearly every single seller who works with his agents stage their homes. He even started his own in-house staging company so every agent can offer the service.

​The cost
If you want professional advice and need to seriously zhuzh up your house, you'll spend at least a few hundred dollars.

Lead designer Stacy Johnson, left, and owner Laurie Fleming collect pieces to stage a kitchen for a client.

For KLRE clients, the cost of an initial consultation is included with every listing agreement, but sellers will pay for furniture and accessory rentals. Fleming said a basic consultation — which includes a visit to the house, a meeting with clients and a list of recommendations — is $350. Usually, she said, the agent pays that fee and recoups it once you sell.

She said a completely vacant home can cost $3,000 to $15,000 for a 30-day contract, depending on how many rooms you're staging — that survey found the living room, main bedroom and kitchen are most important — and for how long. But she's had clients spend upward of $150,000 to $200,000 for her to manage subcontractors on projects that are too small for a big builder and too big for a handyman.

"If house doesn't sell quickly, you'll be incurring some rental or renewal fees," Fleming said. "The value of staging can change quite a bit if you're on the market a long time. That's where it turns upside down for you."

Kari Michael, president and founder of Kariel Staging & Decor in Crystal, said she only stages vacant homes. The starting point for those jobs is $2,000 to $2,500 for a living room, dining room, kitchen and primary bedroom, including decor and 90-day furniture rental.

For the highest-end homes, like those on the Parade Of Homes and Luxury Home Tours, you will easily pay more than $10,000.

​First impressions
​Most buyers today are shopping online, so they're looking at photos of your house first. A properly staged house is key to making great photos that will spur the buyer to see it in person.

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Laurie Fleming looks at art in the warehouse of her home staging company Fix Design Haus.

​The goal, Fleming said, is to usher as many buyers as possible into the house during the first couple of days it's on the market so there's a sense of competition and urgency. That can influence someone to offer more than the asking price. "You have to create fear that the buyer will lose the house," Fleming said. "People want what they want, and they're willing to pay for it." ​Michael agreed. "When a room is staged, it is easily defined," she said. "But when they are empty, it can make it difficult for the potential buyer to know what they are looking at."

Feelings, not data
Fleming said what differentiates her from an agent is an agent focuses on market information while she hones in on emotion.

"I know what makes people feel like they want to live and spend more time in the space," she said. "We're going beyond data."

Staging a house can be a humbling and sometimes painful experience because sellers have to confront parts of their home others might not like. Fleming is the one to gently deliver that news.

"Not every Realtor wants to be the bad cop," she said. "And I don't have a profit or loss based on how the listing proceeds."

Fleming likes to meet with all her staging clients before starting to make sure they're comfortable with the coming changes.

​"I want them to ask questions. I have to read their body language to know what's overwhelming to them and what I can say to them," she said. "You have to have an enormous amount of respect for people and their homes."


Jim Buchta has covered real estate for the Star Tribune for several years. He also has covered energy, small business, consumer affairs and travel. 

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AI poses ‘risk of extinction,’ industry leaders warn Fears grow that technology could soon spread misinformation, eliminate white-collar jobs. ​ By KEVIN ROOSE • New York Times

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A group of industry leaders warned Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war," reads a one-sentence statement released by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety. The open letter was signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI.

The signatories included top executives from three of the leading AI companies: Sam Altman, CEO of Open- AI; Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered "godfathers" of the modern AI movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field. (The third Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, who leads Meta's AI research efforts, had not signed as of Tuesday.)

The statement comes at a time of growing concern about the potential harms of AI. Recent advancements in so-called large language models — the type of AI system used by ChatGPT and other chatbots — have raised fears that AI could soon be used at scale to spread misinformation and propaganda, or that it could eliminate millions of white-collar jobs.

Eventually, some believe, AI could become powerful enough that it could create societal-scale disruptions within a few years if nothing is done to slow it down, although researchers sometimes stop short of explaining how that would happen.

These fears are shared by numerous industry leaders, putting them in the unusual position of arguing that a technology they are building — and, in many cases, are furiously racing to build faster than their competitors — poses grave risks and should be regulated more tightly.

This month, Altman, Hassabis and Amodei met with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to talk about AI regulation. In Senate testimony after the meeting, Altman warned that the risks of advanced AI systems were serious enough to warrant government intervention and called for regulation of AI for its potential harms.

Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, said in an interview that the open letter represented a "coming out" for some industry leaders who privately had expressed concerns about the risks of the technology they were developing.

"There's a very common misconception, even in the AI community, that there only are a handful of doomers,"  Hendrycks said. "But, in fact, many people privately would express concerns about these things."

Some skeptics argue that AI technology is still too immature to pose an existential threat. When it comes to today's AI systems, they worry more about short-term problems, such as biased and incorrect responses, than longer-term dangers.

But others have argued that AI is improving so rapidly that it has already surpassed human-level performance in some areas and that it will soon surpass it in others. They say the technology has shown signs of advanced abilities and understanding, giving rise to fears that "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, a type of AI that can match or exceed human-level performance at a wide variety of tasks, may not be far off.

In a blog post last week, Altman and two other OpenAI executives proposed several ways that powerful AI systems could be responsibly managed. They called for cooperation among the leading AI makers, more technical research into large language models and the formation of an international AI safety organization, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which seeks to control the use of nuclear weapons.

In March, more than 1,000 technologists and researchers signed another letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of the largest AI models, citing concerns about "an out-ofcontrol race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds."

That letter, which was organized by another AI-focused nonprofit, the Future of Life Institute, was signed by Elon Musk and other well-known tech leaders, but it did not have many signatures from the leading AI labs.

The brevity of the new statement from the Center for AI Safety — just 22 words — was meant to unite AI experts who might disagree about the nature of specific risks or steps to prevent those risks from occurring but who share general concerns about powerful AI systems, Hendrycks said.

The statement was initially shared with a few high-profile AI experts, including Hinton, who quit his job at Google this month so that he could speak more freely, he said, about the potential harms of AI. From there, it made its way to several of the major AI labs, where some employees then signed on.

The urgency of AI leaders' warnings has increased as millions of people have turned to AI chatbots for entertainment, companionship and increased productivity, and as the underlying technology improves at a rapid clip.

"I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," Altman told the Senate subcommittee. "We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening."

CHATEAU WINES: THE HISTORY AND GUIDELINES ​

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​A wine can only be called a “Chateau” if it is produced in the vineyards and cellars of a French castle that has been officially recognized by the French government. In order to carry the “Chateau” label, the wine must also adhere to a number of other strict guidelines, including being made from grapes that were all grown in the same vineyard, and being bottled at the chateau where it was produced.

Chateau, the French word for country house, or even castle, has a much more complex meaning in the world of winemaking. Chateau Margaux, as the name implies, is a wine that was produced in the winery of Margaux. Chateau Margaux, a premier cru estate in Bordeaux, has been producing wine since 1867. In contrast to the United States, the word chateau is not the same in the European Union. One of the terms you should be familiar with if you want to become a wine lover is chateau.

A wine produced in Bordeaux from various vineyards in the region of France.

In French, a chteau (pronounced [**to], plural: chteaux) is a manor house or residence for the lord of the manor or a fine country house for nobility or gentry with or without fortifications, originally, and still most frequently used.

If a family member’s ancestors are in the same noble family as one of France’s “noble” families, and if the house has passed down through the family for generations, it is typically referred to as a chateau. Chateau is defined as a residence of a lord who controls territory by the most common definitions in French history.

What Does Château Mean On Wine?

​“Chteau” literally means “castle” in French. A wine estate, on the other hand, is a wine-producing estate, which is usually a combination of vineyards, cellars, and any buildings on the property, which, in rare cases, include a real castle.

Chateau wine is made by harvesting grapes from a specific chteau in France. This region of France is known for its wine. The New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition is the most recent edition. The House of the Dragon glossary can be found here. We have two iOS and Android apps for English Dictionary. Today, there are numerous influences on how English is spoken all over the world. The following sections will look at how the language is changing.

There are several characteristics. Chateau wines are distinguished by their aristocratic origins. They typically have a full body and a rich flavor, with flavors ranging from fruit to woodsy. Although they are frequently costly, they are well worth the outlay. The style of Chteauesque is based on recreating the look and feel of French chteau interiors from the mid-16th century. There are several influences on the wine, including Gothic and Renaissance styles, and they lend a sense of depth and richness to the wine, with flavors ranging from fruit to woodsy. These products are well worth their cost, but they are also quite pricey.

Two Types Of Château Wines
What is the history of Chateau Pépin? Grapes from both Napa and Sonoma are used to make Chteau Red Wine, which honors the memory of our founder. A deep color with soft, round tannins, dark fruit flavors of black cherry and plum, and a touch of cocoa finish this wine, which has a structured structure, savory flavors, and a hint of cocoa. What is bordeaux wine? Typically, a Chteaux blend is 70% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15% Cabernet Franc, and 15% Merlot. This is commonly referred to as a Bordeaux blend. Merlot accounts for the vast majority of Merlot consumed in Saint-milion, Pomerol, and other right bank appellations. In the world of wine, which one is best: white or red? Chteauneuf-du-Pape, a French wine region, produces some of the region’s most flavorful blends of Grenache. The region produces both red and white wine, depending on the grape variety used. The region contains 20 varieties of plants, according to unofficial estimates.
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Chateau Wine

​There are many types of chateau wine, but they all have one thing in common: they are all made from grapes grown in the vineyards of a specific chateau. The chateau wine style is characterized by its full body, rich flavor, and high alcohol content. Chateau wines are typically aged for several years before being released for sale, and they are often quite expensive.

This famous French wine region produces red blends based on Grenache and is known for its bold red blends. It is also home to up to 13 different grape varieties in its official red and white wine varieties. In fact, there are no official varieties in the region. The majority of the grapes used are Cabernet Sauvignon, but other grapes can also be used. In the blend, a number of red Bordeaux, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Carmenre, and Malbec grapes may be included, though it is not always possible to include all six. A deep color and fragrant scent make this wine one of the most popular.

Chateau Wines Of France
Chateau wines are made in the Bordeaux region of France from vines grown on estate vineyards. It is frequently made up of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot and is typically aged in French oak barrels. Chateau red wine is a blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc. Bordeaux wine is a type of wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot blended together.

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