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When Pam Berns mailed a few checks to pay bills, she had no idea such a routine task would throw her small publishing business into chaos.

A record number of suspicious activity reports tied to check fraud this year has put banks on high alert

The crime involves using checks sometimes stolen out of peoples' mailboxes and using chemicals to erase, or "wash," the ink off.

Although check usage has declined in the last couple of decades, check fraud has risen sharply, creating a problem for banks — and customers trying to pay their bills.

When Pam Berns mailed a few checks to pay bills, she had no idea such a routine task would throw her small publishing business into chaos. One of the checks, which she put in a mailbox on a Lincoln Park street in Chicago, was later stolen and rewritten for $7,200 to someone named Mark Pratt. That drained her business bank account, which meant she couldn’t pay the printer, her monthly payroll taxes or her salespeople. Nearly two months later, Berns, 76, hasn’t recovered the stolen money from her