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Kiting Credit Unions

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Kiting could involve collusion between account holders at different financial institutions. An example is a husband and wife who have checking accounts at different institutions (e.g., a credit union and a bank). While the accounts at both institutions may be titled in both names, the checks on one account might only contain the husband’s name and the checks on the other account might only contain the wife’s name. Tellers should be aware of this when evaluating kiting symptoms. Filing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) Credit unions should file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) when they discover a member is engaged in a check-kiting scheme. The SAR should be filed even though the amount of the kite is less than the $5,000 threshold for filing a SAR. SARs are placed in an electronic database that law enforcement officials can access. A SAR …show more content…

Business owners resort to kiting due to poor cash flow. They inflate their checking account balance with nonexistent funds to pay bills, such as their payroll, mortgage/rent, loan payments, and such. The business owner may kite checks between their business account and personal account held at different institutions. The business owner may own another company and kite checks between the two business accounts. It may be extremely difficult to spot a business account-kiting scheme due to the volume of checks deposited daily. Nevertheless, tellers should be alert to the possibility that a business member could be engaged in a kiting scheme when processing the check deposits. To address the risk associated with business account kiting schemes, credit unions should perform a risk assessment by evaluating the business member’s creditworthiness before approving a checking account. The idea is to offer checking accounts to business members who are least likely to abuse the account, which could result in large losses to the credit

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