Can a person writing a bad cheque clean out *your* account?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m having a discussion with my mom over this - she received an email telling her about a Kijiji/ebay scam where people buy something from you with a bad cheque or money order, then they clean out your bank account with the information they get from this. I’m telling her that a bad cheque should not give the writer any information to get access to your account (unless you or your bank are giving it to them, and in that case you should not be allowed out in public without a keeper or you should be suing your bank). I understand that a bad cheque can clean out your bank account** to the amount of the bad cheque plus bank fees**, but you’re not likely to lose more than that.

What say you guys? Do you know of a scam method to get access to people’s bank accounts with bad cheques that I’m not aware of?

2

Don’t canceled checks have the bank where deposited and bank account number stamped on the back?

3

IANAB, but I don’t see a way that this can work. I imagine she’s received a mangled email warning of the standard cheque overpayment scam?

4

I don’t know about this - I’m looking at some of my cashed cheques, and they do have a bunch of stuff on the back, but none of it is labelled as the depositor’s bank account (except in one case where the depositor stamped it on the cheque themselves). Bad cheques aren’t processed the same as cashed cheques, either - when I was in payment processing and we got bad cheques, they didn’t go back to the people who wrote them - we called them and asked them for another cheque (plus fees). We retained possession of the bad cheque.

Any bankers out there? This has got me all curious now. (Nanoda, that’s what I was thinking, too - maybe it was that type of scam.)

5

I’m betting on the check overpayment scam too. People who “want to rent” my house do this often. It’s usually set up by saying that their company or boss will pay, say, 6 months’ rent. I guess I’m supposed to believe that companies are incompetant enough to do such a thing. Anyway, they then back out the deal and request a refund (minus any. They get your good check, you get their bad one. For some reason, the emails tend to have missing personal pronouns, such as “Hello. am responding to your ad.” I suppose it’s a conjugation thing in their native tongue.

Anywhoo, I toy with them for a while before cutting them off.

6

They can always print up a check with the bank codes and pass it as written by you. These are not something you are responsible for.

The ones you lose out on are checks they send you that are bad. You are going to be out the merchandise you sent them. You lose with that alone. The next level up is they send you extra money beyond what was asked for and request the extra back. You definitely lose the merchandise and the amount of money you sent them. The bank may charge you fees on the fraudulent check that is removed from your deposits in a month after it finally bounces. The bank will charge you fees on all your legitimate checks that will bounce because you had less money to cover them than you thought. You could have dozens of insufficient fund fees after the scammer’s check has been removed from your balance total, because of the falling domino’s effect.

7

I’ve been a victim more than once.

WRT the OP’s question, I think they can clean out your acct in theory, but in practice it would be difficult.

  1. I once received my acct statement and was looking it over. WTF? I should have more in there than that! It turned out that I used an ATM at a gas station and the criminals had some sort of widget that captured my info electronically. So the acct statement was like,

10/01/05, 11:00, $60 ATM
10/01/05, 11:02, $60 ATM
10/01/05, 11:04, $60 ATM
10/01/05, 11:06, $60 ATM

The bank’s advice: only use the ATM at the bank. And set a limit on how much can be withdrawn by ATM on a given day.

  1. I started receiving these demands for payment that said my checks had bounced. These were to places where I’d never even shopped. IIRC in a couple cases they sent a copy of the actual bounced check. Most of the info was correct but the account number was wrong. It’s like they missed that on purpose. I got the same sort of demand like 40 times. Each time I sent a notarized letter and a form, I think.

  2. The ex and I had a maid come in to clean once a month. We noticed our account balance was wrong. Turned out a blank check had been stolen—you ready?—from the end of the booklet. I.e. if you put a new booklet in, say with blanks numbered from 1001-1025, you might use a few and be on 1011. If they stole 1012, you’d notice right away. From the back of the booklet, 1025, not so.

This was presented for cash, in person, for $800. The signature was waaaay wrong—mine slants to one side and their slants to the other, for instance. I thought, ‘They don’t want to appear to be someone who has ever seen my signature, which could give police an idea of who did it.’ The people at the bank didn’t seem all that concerned, btw. I asked if they were going to replay their lobby tapes to see who did it. They said probably not—they’re insured.

I never was out any money in these situations.

Back to the OP’s question…it might be possible but you’d hit some real snags.

Draining your acct doesn’t require putting money into another account. Say you have $30K in the bank and someone wants to drain it. If they cash a $30,000 check, that would raise suspicion and possibly a phone call. Do they have $30K on hand to give you? If the check is for a legitimate purchase like a car or house, those businesses have accounts and don’t deal in cash…is this drug money or…? Do it $800 at a time at my bank and you’re going to piss them off. $800 they let go but if I were stung 10 times, it would be worth their trouble to hunt the person down. Or you’ll have to go to a lot of banks where you have an account :dubious: and they probably would have you deposit it, tell you that you can access it when it clears.

And they’d have to steal a lot of legit checks. I don’t think you could make phony checks (i.e. with the wrong acct info) to do it. When they used phony checks (see #2) that relied on the time delay to work. Go to Radio Shack, write a bogus check, and be on your way…Radio Shack won’t realize it till the bank rejects it. But present a phony check in the bank lobby and you’re probably asking for trouble. Maybe you could get $30K in merchandise but you better accomplish it in a month or so.

The ATM could be a problem if you set your withdrawal limit way high, I guess. I’ve heard that that money is really transferred to an acct, i.e. that the person isn’t standing there collecting all that cash. That would draw attention as well, but if it’s sent to an acct, it’s traceable.

The overpayment scam? Yeah, I was selling my car on the net and someone sent me an email. I hadn’t heard of the scam at that time but it was obviously not right. Some guy from Canada is going to buy my car in Texas, sight unseen, front me all this money…and he’s using an agent to do this and will send a car carrier for it. I don’t think so, Tim.

8

I don’t think you read my OP very carefully, lobotomyboy - I wasn’t talking about scams like the ones you have been involved in.

9

I agree that the most likely explanation here is that featherlou’s mom misunderstood the warning she got, or the warning was constructed by someone who misunderstood the scam. Nevertheless, I’m curious about the premise in the OP, which describes a "scam where people clean out your bank account with the information they get from [buying something from you with a bad cheque or money order]."

Now, my understanding is that if someone gets your bank account number, they could arrange to clean out your account. Snnipe 70E’s reply raised the as yet unanswered question of whether your account number is on the check returned to the scammer. So the question remains, what relevant information could someone possibly get from sending you a fraudulent payment?

10

My bad. Sorry for the thread cloggage. :smack: