I was on the other side of one of these situations. I think you are letting yourself get pushed around. This should be on your client to resolve. They are responsible to get your payment into your hands. The fraud was against them, not you.
We mailed out a payment to a vendor that was intercepted, altered and cashed. And then the thief duplicated the check and cashed it two more times with different fictitious names.
As the writer of the check, we went to our bank (also JP Morgan Chase) and told them of the fraud. We also made a police report. The bank made us whole for the missing funds (around $5K).
For companies that write a lot of checks, JPM Chase has a program called Positive Pay which helps prevent check fraud. When you write a check, you go to your account online and list the check number, amount and payee. When a check is presented at the bank, the bank then checks against your list. If there’s a mismatch you get a notification and you have about a half a day to either approve or deny the check. It’s a little more work, but it resolved our problem. Chase doesn’t charge us anything to use Positive Pay.
I had a similar situation last year. Because of the high inflation last year I gave everyone pretty substantial raises. One employee got a $3/hr raise from $25 to $28. She came to me the next week and told me her husband’s company would hire her for $35 hour (this is for general office/administrative work, so semi-skilled).
I called her bluff. I had checked the starting salary for office workers with a little experience seems to be around $20-22 in my HCOL area, so I knew that if she left I wouldn’t have trouble hiring someone.
She’s still here, still getting $28/hr.
One thing no one else seems to mention is that if you give one employee an extra large raise, word may get out and it will cause discontent among your other employees who earn less.