How to redact a bank statement on a Mac

To redact a bank-statement screenshot on a Mac, cover each sensitive field with a solid, fully opaque shape or a pixel-destroying scramble, export a brand-new flattened image rather than saving over the original, then check it before you send. Black out the full account number (leave the last four digits), the routing number, any full card numbers, your Social Security number, and the transactions and balance that have nothing to do with why you are sharing it. Do not blur those fields, and do not upload the statement to an online redaction website. If your source is a PDF rather than an image, use the real redaction tool in Preview or Acrobat instead, which is the rest of this guide.

What to black out, and what to leave

Redacting a statement is mostly about deciding what the recipient actually needs and hiding everything else. A landlord checking that you can pay rent needs to see income landing, not your full account number. An accountant needs the transactions, not your card details. Share the minimum that proves the one thing being asked. The table below is the default for the common fields.

Image or PDF? The route depends on the source

The safe method depends on what you are starting from, so settle this first.

A screenshot or an image. If you screenshotted your mobile-banking app, or you have a screen capture or an image export of a statement, you are redacting an image. That works exactly like how to redact a screenshot on a Mac: cover each field with a solid opaque shape, or scramble it, then export a fresh flattened file. An image cannot carry a hidden text layer, so a flattened image is often the safest thing to share in public, since there is no selectable text left to leak.

A PDF from your bank. If your statement is the PDF your bank issued, do not paint black boxes on it in Preview's Markup tools. Those boxes are annotations that sit on top of live, selectable text, so the recipient can delete the box or copy the text out from underneath. Use real redaction instead: in Adobe Acrobat, Tools then Redact, which deletes the underlying content; Preview on current macOS also has a Redact tool in the Markup bar that removes the text rather than covering it. After redacting a PDF, export or save a fresh copy and reopen it to confirm the text is gone, not hidden. ScrubShot works on images, not PDFs, so for a PDF the built-in redaction tools are the route.

The safe way to redact an image on a Mac

You can do this in Preview, with care.

1. Open the screenshot in Preview and show the Markup toolbar.
2. Choose the rectangle shape. Do not reach for a blur or a highlighter, for the reasons below.
3. Set its fill to solid black and its opacity to 100 percent, and cover each field from the table above completely. A marker or highlighter applies ink below full opacity, which leaves the digits readable when someone pushes brightness and contrast.
4. Cover generously. A box traced tightly around a 16-digit card number still tells anyone how long the number is and where it sat. Redact the whole line or a fixed-width bar, not a shape that hugs the digits.
5. Flatten it. Go to File, then Export, and save a fresh PNG. Do not save over the original. Exporting a new file bakes the shapes into the pixels and drops the editable annotations.

Why the tempting shortcuts leak

This is the part almost every bank-statement guide skips.

A blurred account number can be rebuilt. An account number, a routing number and a card number are all short, structured strings of digits in a known font, which is the single easiest case to reconstruct. In 2022 Dan Petro at Bishop Fox released Unredacter, which recovers pixelated text by rendering each candidate string in the same font, pixelating the guess with the same settings, and matching it against the redacted image, walking character by character. It builds on an earlier tool, Depix. A blur is a weaker version of the same idea, not a stronger one, and a low-radius blur can be estimated back. There is more on whether a blurred or pixelated image can be reversed, but for a bank statement the short answer is do not blur the numbers.

A routing number plus an account number is enough to attempt fraud. This is the specific reason a bank statement is riskier than an ordinary screenshot. With both numbers a criminal can attempt an unauthorized ACH debit, and ACH pulls are not authenticated the way a card payment is, so the fraud is often only caught when you next read your statement. That is why the routing number comes off entirely and the account number keeps only its last four digits.

A black box on a PDF can be a layer, not a deletion. In January 2019, lawyers for Paul Manafort filed a court document with black boxes over sensitive passages, but the text underneath was still there, and anyone could select and copy it out. The same mistake happens with a bank-statement PDF the moment you cover text with a Markup rectangle instead of using a real redaction tool. On a PDF, delete the content; do not draw over it.

An online redaction tool means uploading your statement. The free "redact your bank statement" websites do the work on their servers, which means your full, un-redacted statement, with the account and routing numbers still on it, is uploaded to a stranger before it is cleaned. That is the one document you least want to hand to an unknown third party. Redact on your own machine.

Check that it actually worked

Redaction is worth verifying every single time, and a bank statement doubly so. Open the file you are about to send, not the one you were editing. Zoom all the way in on each covered field. Push brightness and contrast to their extremes and look for ghosting behind the boxes. On a PDF, try to select and copy text over the redacted areas; you should get nothing. Confirm you exported a fresh, flat file. Thirty seconds here is the difference between hidden and gone.

How ScrubShot handles it

The manual route works, but it is fiddly and unforgiving, so I built ScrubShot to make the safe path the default for screenshots and images. Press Fn + Space and it captures the whole screen with ScreenCaptureKit and opens it in an editor, so you can grab a mobile-banking screen and clean it in one place. You crop afterwards rather than fighting a drag selection.

The Scrub tool is the part I care about. A normal pixelate sets each block to the average of the pixels beneath it, which is the signal Depix and Unredacter exploit. ScrubShot does not do that. It uses what I think of as a content-independent scramble: each block is filled from pixels sampled at random from across the whole selected region, so the pattern is decoupled from whatever sat underneath. It looks like a redaction and keeps the rough colors of the area, but there is no per-block relationship to the original digits to solve for. It reverses to nothing by design, and the scrub is baked straight into the image, so the original pixels are gone, not hidden on a layer.

The capture, scrub and share flow makes no network connections, so a screenshot of your account never leaves your Mac. To be precise, the app does talk to a server for the free-trial check, license activation and update checks, and that request carries a hashed machine identifier and your license key, never any image data. ScrubShot works on images, not PDFs; it runs on macOS 14 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel, and it needs Screen Recording and Accessibility permission to capture the screen and to see the Fn shortcut.

FAQ

Can bank statements be redacted?

Yes, and it is legal to hide personal details before you share one with a landlord, an accountant, or a support agent. The rule is what you may not do: never change an amount, a date, or a balance, because altering the numbers is document fraud, not redaction. You may cover sensitive fields, but you may not rewrite the record.

What do I black out on a bank statement?

Hide the full account number (leave the last four digits so it is still clearly yours), the routing number, any full card numbers, and your Social Security number. Cover your name and address unless the recipient specifically needs them, plus the running balance and every transaction that has nothing to do with why you are sharing it. Keep only the lines that prove the one thing being asked, like a salary deposit or your address.

How do I black out information on my bank statement?

If it is a screenshot or an image, cover each field with a solid, fully opaque shape or destroy the pixels with a scramble, then export a new flattened file and check it. If it is a PDF, use the real redaction tool in Preview or Adobe Acrobat, which deletes the underlying text rather than drawing a box over it. Do not upload the statement to an online redaction website.

Is it safe to blur an account number on a bank statement?

No. An account number is a short string of digits in a known font, which is exactly the kind of text a pixelated or blurred redaction can be rebuilt from. Tools like Bishop Fox's Unredacter and Depix reconstruct pixelated characters by re-pixelating guesses until they match. Use a solid opaque cover or a scramble that destroys the pixels, never a blur.

Does ScrubShot upload my bank statement?

No. ScrubShot works on screenshots and images, not PDFs, and its capture, scrub and share flow makes no network connections, so the image never leaves your Mac. The only time it reaches a server is the trial check, license activation and update checks, which send a hashed machine identifier and your license key and no image data.