That is a little bit like arguing that in an industrial corporation producing widgets, it’s not the workers who actually make the widgets who make money for the company but only the salespeople who sell the widgets. Of course they are the ones who turn the company’s products into money, but these products have to be made to begin with, and the staff employed in the manufacturing of the products are in the production chain to make the widgets.
It’s similar with a bank teller. Banks need to attract funding if they want to lend or invest (which is, indeed, where their profit is made). And if you’re a retail bank, then the your main source of funding are customer deposits. And if you’re a brick-and-mortar retail bank, then you’ll need tellers to attract customer deposits, because that’s what your clients expect. Of course other business models with other sources of funding are possible (e.g. a wholesale banking model where you get your funding on the money markets), but if retail is your banking businss model then tellers are simply part of the overall production chain that you need to operate in order to make money.
Tellers receive minimum wage, just like McDonald’s employees they don’t get paid enough to really care. And I promise you, tellers don’t care if the Big bank makes money or not! Of course my DIL may be just a bit jaded and cynical, I don’t think so, though.
Leaving aside the idea of a husband finding out his wife secretly opened up an account of her own or whatever by just asking a teller to deposit $5 into it – “no, I don’t know the number, but here’s her name” – I think the idea is, they don’t want you walking in with money you want to give me, except you don’t know my account number and so it gets deposited into the account of some other other Waldo Pepper.
Because then, some time later, you’re angrily insisting that you totally put that money in my account, and I’m wagging my finger at you and screaming that you’re a liar, and maybe both of us get to wondering whether the bank teller was a thief or a screwup, and, really, who wins in that situation? Does the ensuing brouhaha help anybody?
Wouldn’t you have a receipt of said transaction? I guess if you can’t keep up with your I.D. you’re not likely to have any proof you deposited into Waldo Peppers acct., but, really… I have never had any bank refuse a deposit. I have been refused access to an account w/o I.D. But I resolved that by going to the car for my drivers lisc.! Easy Peasey.
So now you can prove it went into some account that isn’t mine. Does the bank then reveal the name of that account’s owner to you? Does it yank the money out of his account on your say-so, after he (a) shrugged upon seeing an unexpected deposit, and promptly (b) spent it down to where the rent check he just now wrote will bounce if said cash gets removed? We can come up with tons of other questions; or we can sidestep 'em by saying “no, give the bank teller an account number, and the bank teller will then put the money in that account, period.”
I did exactly this, for the last half of 2015, when I was working away from home & renting a private apartment. Landlord gave me her account number at the local bank, I filled out the deposit slips, and handed it to the teller with the wad of cash each month. I’d take a picture of the deposit receipt and message it to her for confirmation. Was never a problem for me, the bank, or the landlord.
The article doesn’t say the man wasn’t allowed the deposit because the accounts were dormant, but because he did not have ID. that relates to the “deposit into an account owned by another” scenario. In this case, a teller would probably be highly suspicious that a homeless person had “a garbage bag full of cash” to deposit. it would be reasonable to suspect that the person may be being paid to participate in a money laundering scheme - a “mule”, of sorts.
That said, there are reasons why a bank may not allow a deposit into a dormant account, including the fact that the account may be in the process of escheatment. Activity on dormant accounts in general is subject to higher scrutiny by banks because dormant accounts are a common target of thieves.
I used to do that too, but the reason was “I was living in South Africa” and electronic transfers were much more prevalent than check books.
Nowadays in the US I avoid writing checks too. Mostly I use Bill Pay, which in the case of paying small institutions or individuals means the bank actually mails them a check anyway, but one that doesn’t have my account details on it. I’m a little paranoid about sending my own checks out into the wild, ever since someone got a hold of one and stole $2400 from our account. Wells Fargo truly sucks at the paperwork, so it took over a month to get our money back. They were really good at opening a new account though! :rolleyes:
I once transferred some money (£100) into the wrong account. My daughter and her landlord had the same first name and I sent the transfer to her landlord instead of her. When I phoned the bank, they said that there was no way they could retrieve the money and all I could do was ask the landlord nicely to pass it on; which she did, fortunately.