Online check issuer Qchex has been taken out back and shot by the Federal Trade Commission

Online check issuer Qchex has been taken out back and shot by the Federal Trade Commission and a US District Court for violating federal law. The company has been ordered to halt operations and hand over half a million dollars in ill-gotten gains.
If you're a fraudster who has been making use of Qchex.com to issue checks out of other people's bank accounts, you had better start hunting for a new moneymaking scheme. A US District Court has ordered the online check processing company to halt its illegal operations and to cough up the cash it made from the operation.
The case goes back to September of 2006, when the Federal Trade Commission accused Qchex of violating federal law because the company implemented no safeguards to prevent fraud in its check creation service. Qchex apparently created and sent checks drawn from any old bank account that users claimed were theirs without verifying that they were the owners of said accounts. Unsurprisingly, this made Qchex a shining beacon for scammers from around the globe who used the service to steal money from people's accounts, using those same checks to pay for various goods and services.

It turns out that those behind Qchex didn't even try to make themselves seem more legit than they actually were; US District Judge Janis Sammartino observed that the company's own documentation shows that it failed to employ adequate verification procedures over six years of operation. Sammartino described the service as a "dinner bell" for fraudsters that resulted in "substantial losses" for consumers.

As a result, Sammartino has issued an order permanently barring those behind Qchex from continuing to operate the site or any other similar service without employing various authentication methods to verify that customers are authorized to draw money out of specified checking accounts. If they choose to open another Qchex-like service, the defendants must maintain documentation to show they have performed the proper verification procedures for eight years, and they must absorb all fees and expenses required to comply with the order.