How to protect your cheques in Canada

Not how to protect your cheques physically - that's up to you and your martial arts training.

I mean how to ensure your cheques are deposited to the account of your choosing.  Because even though you write on your cheques who the payee ought to be, it can be signed off to a third party to be cashed or deposited.

Other places in the world use markings to "cross" the cheque to ensure it is deposited to a bank account only, and not cashed (literally exchanged for cash).  In other places, you may write "non-negotiable" to ensure it is deposited or cashed only by the person named on the front as payee, and no one else.

But Canada and the USA does this differently.  USA should be similar (but you should check for yourself) to Canada, but the following is Canada specific:

Write "For deposit only to account of payee" on the back of the cheque to ensure that the cheque can only be deposited (not cashed) and to the named payee only (and can't be negotiated --- signed --- away to a third party) [1, 2].

[1] Added Protection when paying by Cheque --- Financial Consumer Agency of Canada
[2] Cheques - What You Need to Know --- Canadian Bankers Association

Is Ammyy Behind the Scammy Phone Call?

My friend just relayed to me this funny story of receiving a very scammy phone call recently.

Bottom line:
Someone with a thick Indian accent called my friend, claiming to be from "Windows Service System" based in "Otwa, the Canada state", claiming that they detected on my friend's computer many malicious malware, and wanted to show my friend these malicious files by asking him to download and run this "Ammyy Admin" software.  Based on the content of the phone conversation, and subsequent online checking, it's pretty safe to say the Indian sounding fellow's end-game is to get remote access to my friend's computer, and to force him to cough up money to "fix" the computer.  If you get such a call, just hang up on them.

Some general details:
The Telus phone company is aware of the scam, according to the Telus phone operator, and the operator's advice was to just hang up on them.  The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre [1] is aware as well, and have published a bulletin on this.  The internet chatter on this is loud and clear that this scammy type phone call is popular and old.

How the call went down:
The fellow with the Indian accent (let's call him Ishaan - not his real name) called my friend (let's call him Greg - not real name either).  Ishaan says he's calling from "Windows Service System, service provider of Windows", and he's calling because he's "getting regular pop-up alerts about how [Greg's] hard drive is about to crash-down due to malicious files".