Do I REALLY need to write 2020 on everything?

January 9, 2020 1:48 PM

Lots of talk has been going around about how if you abbreviate the date on official paperwork to just "20" then someone can come behind you and change it to 2019 or 2021 to take advantage of you. But what exactly is it they could accomplish by doing that?

It seems like good general advice, and not difficult to implement, but what specifically could a bad actor do to you if you abbreviate the year? It's not like an unscrupulous landlord could change your lease to 2019, claim you're a year behind, and successfully sue you over it, right? I suppose a contract where you write in a specific end date could be fraudulently extended, but is that the worst thing? What are some realistic examples of how you could leave yourself open to opportunistic fraud by shortening the date?

posted by Mr.Encyclopedia to Law & Government (22 answers total)

Snopes:: "Many critics found the subject of these warnings rather unlikely, however, noting that many documents are vulnerable to fraudulent alteration by a variety of means regardless of how any dates they include might be rendered. And in such cases, various forms of evidence can usually be marshaled to prove the alteration and thwart its purpose."
posted by smoke at 1:56 PM on January 9, 2020 [5 favorites]

One might use it to cover up a prior bad act. Like, uh, you say I stole your identity and emptied your bank account, but, look, I have a piece of paper saying you gave me power of attorney a few years back.

(Also, why are we just hearing about this now? A document marked x/y/19 could just as easily be adjusted to 1999 or whatever.)
posted by box at 2:00 PM on January 9, 2020 [16 favorites]

I suppose if you gave someone a postdated check they could make the year 2019 and cash it and screw you over. I’m not sure who writes postdated checks anymore but eh?
posted by kimberussell at 2:10 PM on January 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Do You Really Have to Write Out “2020” on Checks to Avoid Being Scammed?

"Though there may eventually be some cases of nefarious actors adding digits to checks, it won’t likely be a widespread problem for consumers and financial institutions. It’s not very common nowadays for scammers to tamper with numbers on checks in general. Checks themselves are also rapidly falling out of favor, with the rise of electronic payment methods. Still, as Rheingold points out, the types of people who still regularly use checks, like senior citizens, are often the most vulnerable to financial scams.

In the end, though, some overexaggerated hype about check tampering probably won’t do much harm, and you should probably put in a little extra effort to write out 2020 in full, just to be safe."
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:17 PM on January 9, 2020

Considering that there are techniques for counterfeiters to remove ink from paper, this is a really overblown fear. With that said, you should be using 4 digit years because it incurs minimal additional effort and removes ambiguity. If you wanted to be real nice you'd use a date format that was universally understood (i.e. makes clear which part is the month part and which is the day).
posted by mmascolino at 2:19 PM on January 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Your landlord could change the dates on your multiyear lease, of which only paper copies exist, forcing you to move out earlier, even though he only had enough ink to write two numbers.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:20 PM on January 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Anyone can fake anything. No kidding.

Indeed. I have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro. And Photoshop. And an entire digital production studio in my fucking pocket.

Don’t worry about this. But worry about everything else. It’s the social contract I guess?
posted by mr_roboto at 2:31 PM on January 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

The actual, for-real, serious-as-a-heart-attack, profitable use cases for adding two numerals to the year on a check are vanishingly minute. Honestly, I can’t think of anything remotely realistically probable. In any case, most checks these days include carbons that you could use to show you didn’t add the additional two numerals, if need be.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:43 PM on January 9, 2020

2020/01/09. ISO standard, completely unambiguous.

I started writing dates this way when I moved to Canada and discovered that people here seem equally likely to write today's date as 1/9/20 as they are to write it 9/1/20. I've actually seen an official offer letter (draft, fortunately) with the start date off by months because of this.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:07 PM on January 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: This might sound silly - but PLEASE write the full date on documents. I've done archival filing and cataloging - not for old records but for recent personnel records, etc - and it's so frustrating to see a partial date and you can't determine the year or you are mixing up the month and the day. Obviously, this was a bigger problem in the 2000s, but still could be confusing - is 20-05-21 May 21, 2020 or May 20, 2021? This matters if it's a financial record, or maybe you need to sort contracts into chronological order, etc.

Once I knew some people who kept records for a research study and inputted all the interview dates into a spreadsheet simply as "May 15" (meaning May 15th of that year), only to find that the dates had been interpreted by the program as May 1, 2015 (which was NOT the right date).

As noted above, it's not really an issue of fraud. But if you have any sympathy for the people who may be filing later documents - whether in a workplace, or dealing with your personal papers in an emergency - please write out / enter the full date. Ideally, you'd use the ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD) which is very fast to write, but also means that you never mix up the month and day numbers (when the year comes first, the month always follows).
posted by jb at 3:12 PM on January 9, 2020 [51 favorites]

ISO format dates also work really well in filenames because they allow you to sort by document date. The file last modified date is often not accurate or reliable for that.
posted by Lanark at 3:19 PM on January 9, 2020 [22 favorites]

Seconding jb, fraud isn't the reason to do this, misinterpretation is. It's one of the reasons that I either use ISO format, or write the month out with letter abbreviation and add a 4 digit year (e.g. 9/Jan/2020) if a format isn't specified.
posted by Aleyn at 4:09 PM on January 9, 2020 [4 favorites]

checks usually look like ___/ ___/ 20___ on the address line, so just using the 2 year digits will work fine. On legal documents, write the full date as unambiguously as possible.
posted by theora55 at 4:33 PM on January 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

just as a data point, i haven't seen handwriteable printed paper checks in a book for personal use with a prefilled 2-digit year as described above since like 1995. i have had many checking accounts in multiple countries during that time.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:13 PM on January 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

Yes, people can fake anything. The degree of difficulty makes a HUGE difference, though. Not only because not everyone understands Photoshop well enough to use it, and not because it's kind of priveleg-y to assume everyone has enough access to Photoshop and a scanner to do this. If something is sufficiently easy to do, then it becomes attractive to do it at a large scale. This increases the risk to yourself, yes, but also you're losing a sort of "herd immunity" against fraud.

This is why I don't e-mail passwords, for example. It's a tiny bit of additional vulnerability for that specific account and person, but the systemic implications are huge.
posted by amtho at 12:44 AM on January 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

This specific warning is probably overblown fearmongering. But I have been writing out the full four-digit year since 2000, because writing 00 seemed stupid, and I can't understand why writing only the last two digits is still a thing. It's annoying enough to have to disambiguate UK and US day/month order -- why make things even more difficult for the sake of saving an entire two characters?
posted by confluency at 1:56 AM on January 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

> ISO format dates also work really well in filenames because they allow you to sort by document date.

Yes! I recently downloaded a whole bunch of financial statements and had to do a batch rename before I could do anything useful with them because someone in their wisdom decided that DDMMYYYY was a great naming convention for a series of dated documents.
posted by confluency at 2:00 AM on January 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

> I've actually seen an official offer letter (draft, fortunately) with the start date off by months because of this.

This is a bit offtopic, but my favourite error resulting from a misinterpretation of notations is being off by a decade when calculating the founding date of various 17th century cities, because letters patent are dated with the year of the current monarch's reign, and not everyone knows that Charles II's reign is officially backdated to the year that Charles I was decapitated.

In retrospect, that was really inconsiderate.
posted by confluency at 2:10 AM on January 10, 2020 [6 favorites]

I think the fraud protection aspect of this comes down to a risk analysis. The risk that you will be victimized by someone altering a date in this manner is very very small, but if it does happen, the implications may be very large (even if you are able to prove the alteration, that may involve spending a lot of time and effort, if not the legal system). The effort it takes to prevent this risk, however, is also vanishingly small, and also has the benefit of reducing ambiguity, so why not do it?

The Long Now Foundation actually suggests using five digit dates (as in today is January 10th, 02020) to ostensibly prevent the "Y10K Bug" several millenia early, but also to encourage people to think about the long term future as a part of their regular life.
posted by Rock Steady at 4:35 AM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Omg if this overblown fear for writing “‘20” for the year means more people, specifically Americans, will adopt the ISO standard for writing dates then I’m all for it. Can we somehow utilise this to also get online articles to write their published dates too?
posted by like_neon at 5:28 AM on January 10, 2020 [5 favorites]

I almost had my proof of residence rejected because my 99-year lease was written out with a two-digit year (?!) and the clerk reading it assumed the previous century. Write your dates YYYY-MM-DD like civilized people!
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 6:43 AM on January 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think it is probably best practice to write any year in full when signing a document, but I don't understand why the fearmongering is singling out "20" for "2020" as a problem. Surely it could also be an issue if I signed a document last year with "19" instead of "2019" and someone decided to add numbers after to make it look like, for example, I'd signed the document in 1999.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 4:26 PM on January 10, 2020