Verify Payee with SentiLink's Treasury Check Verification Service

At SentiLink, we’re continuously innovating to stay ahead of fraudsters—and today, we’re excited to announce our latest release: our own Treasury Check Verification Service (TCVS). Built directly into our dashboard and available free to all SentiLink partners, this service addresses a critical gap in the existing Treasury verification ecosystem, verifying payee names, making check fraud that much harder to pull off.

Check out the demo below, or read on for more information!

The challenge with Treasury checks

Treasury checks are a cornerstone of government payments. Whether it’s tax refunds, Social Security benefits, or veterans’ payments, these checks carry a level of trust that makes them especially appealing to fraudsters. Their high legitimacy, coupled with the “next day availability” clause (where the first $5,525 is accessible by the next business day), creates a lucrative target for criminals. Fraudsters have found that by stealing these checks from mailboxes, altering key details or creating replicas—a process known as “washing” or “cooking”—they can cash them and divert funds into accounts they control. You can learn more about how these fraudsters operate in this post by David Maimon, our Head of Fraud Intelligence. 

However, even as the Treasury Department developed an online check verification service to counter this threat, a significant shortfall remained. Their web portal lacks a field for verifying the payee name. While their API was updated in November 2024 to include this important detail, the user-facing portal still hasn’t been updated. This gap allows fraudsters to simply change the name on a check and still pass the verification process, rendering the system far less effective. Institutions trying to integrate directly with the Treasury department face a huge backlog in requests for API access and internal challenges securing engineering resources to build a direct connection and user interface for processing checks.

How SentiLink’s TCVS works

Here at SentiLink, we have been able to gain access to the updated API and we’ve built our own Treasury Check Verification Service to fill this critical gap. It provides a simple-to-use interface for users to enter the check details, including the payee name. The system verifies the information against Treasury data and flags any mismatching fields.

With the ability to mismatch flags this quickly, your institution will be able to accept legitimate treasury checks and stop fraudulent ones, while complying with the “next-day availability” stipulation.

A strategic advantage for our partners

We’re proud to offer this service free to all SentiLink partners. If you’re already a SentiLink partner, get in touch with your account team and we’ll help you get access. If you’re not a SentiLink partner, TCVS is just one example of our commitment to delivering innovative fraud solutions, get in touch here and we’ll help you get started.