Any money transfer service–like PayPal, Venmo, etc–has the risk of chargebacks. Even if it gets resolved in your favor, there’s a lot of time and hassle that goes along with trying to straighten everything out.
I bought a car on ebay and used a cashier’s check from a major bank that rhymes with disgrace. The seller called the bank and verified the legitimacy of the document. OP could do the same but independently verify the phone number: don’t use what’s on the check. But, honestly, I wouldn’t bother. This is a very common scam.
Well with the over-payment for the never agreed on sale and the calls from 2 different numbers in two different parts of the country and the return address from California and the woman’s email address that this started with. No, I won’t waste any time on the check.
I did spend time reporting it to two Federal Agencies. I doubt anything will come of it though. I’m not out anything and learned a valuable lesson at least. And hey, the scammer is out the cost of a priority mail at least.
I used to mess with scammers all the time. I had one send me not one, not two, but three fake checks, overnight through Fedex after I kept telling him I wasn’t getting them. 
I got him to add even more money to the fake check, because he wanted me to go to WalMart to wire him the excess funds. I told him the closest WalMart was 100+ miles away, and a taxi ride would be expensive…
Also, this was for a rusty, 20+ year old Saab 900, that I was asking $400 for. The buyer supposedly was going to have it sent over to him in England from Maine…
I also was a law enforcement officer, and can tell you that if you haven’t yet suffered any financial loss, there is no sense in reporting it to anyone, as no one will care. If there has been a monetary loss, go ahead and report it, but the likelihood of any kind of recovery is slim to none, and Slim left town already.
I’m not sure if the scammer is out any money when they send a check. They may be using stolen credit cards or some other scam to pay for the shipping. It might be good to contact the shipping company and let them know you’re dealing with a scammer. If it was paid for with a stolen CC, the shipping company may be able contact the CC company and report the fraud.
As the OP said: "I just received a cashier’s check out of nowhere from a person I don’t know. ".
HIGHLY unlikely to be good. In fact I’d say the odds of my winning Powerball tonight (a Friday, and the drawing isn’t on Friday) are slightly higher than the odds that this check is good.
The OP would see it credited to his account, then a few days later it would be reversed, probably with a stiff fee on top.
Well on the bright side, 4 of the 6 items I listed sold. The piano just went today.
The cheap air hockey table we put out to the road instead and it went for free.
I added to the descriptions of my items: No checks or Cashier’s checks accepted. Already had a scam attempted against me.
This seems to help eliminate the scam inquiries.
You absolutely can bring counterfeit money into a bank, unwittingly or not. And you should, don’t just throw it away. Then there is a procedure, where the bank fills out information about the bill, asks you questions about where you might’ve got it (if cooperative) or any information they might have about you if you run. Then they send it off to the Secret Service at some point who may use it in the future.
Sure, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea to try to deposit it and say “I think it’s counterfeit”.
I haven’t worked in banking in a dozen years, but at least then it would happen and we were instructed to fill out the form and hand them a receipt of sorts. No implication that they were in trouble, though I didn’t follow up after (couldn’t anyway)
Years ago, I drove all the way to Little Rock to turn in an obviously counterfeit, modern-date United States One Cent coin to the local United States Secret Service office. The Secret Service agent was very professional and polite but he did relate that his coworkers in Washington, D.C. would be expected to give him a good-natured hard time about how agents spend their time down in Arkansas. He gave me an official Receipt for Contraband that described the coin as “one counterfeit penny.” I still have the receipt; I thought it was pretty cool. For those pedants who like to say that the United States does not produce “pennies” but only “one-cent” pieces, here is one more piece of evidence that the U.S. government does use the term “penny.”
Frank Abagnale, whose story was portrayed with some liberty about details in Catch Me If You Can apparently learned the trick from a bank teller he was bopping about cheque routing codes. He printed cheques that appeared to come from a regional bank, but the OCR routing codes he put on the cheques sent them through a clearing house on the other side of the country. In the 60’s, that meant the cheque could take weeks to be detected as counterfeit and returned to the bank that cashed it. (Presumably a side effect of trucking rather than flying the bank paperwork cross-country) I would like to think that cheque tech has advanced a lot since then, but apparently there are still some exploitable bugs in the system. .
I was going to say that this had to be the dumbest counterfeiter ever, but maybe he made $6.73 over the course of his career and was never apprehended.
There was a counterfeiter who only made dollar bills and wasn’t caught until he tossed out his counterfeiting equipment after a fire made them unusable.