Advertisement

The Lapeer County Prosecutor's Office announced Dec. 20 that it will be offering Stop Loss to local businesses. The online service facilitates returned check collection.

"We deal with quite a few cases of this," said Mike Hodges, chief assistant prosecutor for Lapeer County. "It's pretty prevalent, so this program should help a lot."

The prosecutor's office is partnering with local law enforcement and Heartland Payment Systems on the program, and hopes to have it implemented by Jan. 2.

The prosecutor's office chose to work with Stop Loss after researching several different options.

"We feel that Stop Loss allows for a more local touch that we wouldn't get from some of the other programs," Hodges said.

The program allows both merchants and the prosecutor's office to access the status of returned check collections on a secure Web site. Stop Loss eliminates some of the paperwork that is often associated with bad check recovery, and is provided at a minimal cost to the merchants.

Bob Dennany, territorial manager for Heartland Payment Systems, said that programs similar to Stop Loss have greatly increased merchants' chances of recovering funds from bad checks in other states.

"On their own, merchants have about a 50% chance of recovering funds," Dennany said. "That number jumps to 90% when they have access to programs like this."

Hodges said merchants have a hard time recovering funds for several reasons.

"True criminals often use fictitious names, addresses, and IDs making it hard to track them down," Hodges said. "Other people just blow it off."

Dennany speculated that the success of the program is attributable to it being more official. Through the program, the person who wrote the bad check is first notified about the steps they need to take to make restitution without prosecuting attorney fees being added.

If the offender chooses to ignore the notification, prosecutor's fees and the promise of prosecution if restitution is not made in a timely fashion will follow.

"It's kind of like a parking ticket," Dennany said. "If you get a parking ticket, you may choose not to pay it. But if you get a court summons, you do whatever it takes to take care of it."