Publicity Hound Marilynn Mobley of Atlanta, Georgia writes with this comment about my advice two weeks ago to stop staging boring check-passing photos:
“AMEN to your advice about how dreadful ‘passing the check’ photos are. I thought you might be interested to know that they can actually be dangerous as well.
“Recently, I picked up a magazine to find the cover contained the most boring check passing photo I’ve ever seen. While laughing about it with one of our security experts, he said, ‘Wow, look at that!’ He was responding to the fact that the check being passed was an actual check. To prove a point, he showed me in less than 10 minutes how to use the account number and routing number (which was visible because it hadn’t been blurred or removed) to access the bank account of the company giving the check. While we, of course, didn’t actually move any money, we could have. The photo contained everything we needed to move money from one account to another, or to make ‘legitimate’ online purchases.
“Admittedly, people in companies like mine (an Internet security company that protects corporate networks from hackers) have a heightened sense of awareness about this issue. Still, it may be helpful to your readers to know that the criminal mind looks at photos very differently from those of us who think only pure thoughts.
“Oh! Did I mention the publication was a security magazine?”
The Publicity Hound says:
That’s one more great reason to stop passing checks. Dan Collins, media relations director for a hospital, says there are all sorts of interesting events you can create to draw the media, rather than having to rely on boring cliche events like ribbon-cuttings that the media hate—and often refuse to cover. He was my guest on a teleseminar called “Fun Alternatives to Boring Ground-breakings, Ribbon-cuttings and Check-passings.”