People deposit bad checks all the time. The bank simply debits it from the account and adds a charge. It is part of doing business.
Right.
To add to this, what if I deposit the check then immediately withdraw cash at the ATM, buy something, etc. Isn’t that effectively the same as cashing it in terms of “committing fraud”?
Depositing versus cashing seems to be an evidentiary distinction, not a legal distinction. Legally speaking, a claim to ownership is a claim to ownership. I get that from an evidentiary standpoint depositing the check and letting it sit might undercut an element of intent, suggesting ignorance of the true circumstances, but that is a distinction one would have to rely on the police and the prosecuting attorney to make. The police could just as well arrive at the conclusion that you are either a very bold or very bad criminal, depositing a bad check in your own bank and letting it sit.
Keeping in mind the main thrust here, which I know we agree on: it is a bad idea to try and do anything with this check, other than perhaps bring it to the attention of the police.
Whether or not someone is more likely to be arrested for trying to cash rather than deposit a bad check is a fine discussion to have, but I strongly suspect the same basic elements are there for an arrest whether the attempt is made to cash it or deposit it. You’re then just relying on the discretion of the bank to report, the police to arrest, the prosecutor to charge, and (if it comes to it) the defense attorney to argue the absence of intent/knowledge on the part of the person attempting to cash or deposit the check, with the understanding it might be easier to argue against intent if the funds are merely (sought to be) deposited.
No, or at least I don’t think so, because when the check bounces, it’s your own account that will go overdrawn (assuming, that is, that your bank permits you to withdraw against uncleared funds at all)
It doesn’t need to be instantaneous. The waiting time is well worth the effort.
It may very well be an authentic check in every way. A check that is then cancelled after it has been deposited. Without a crystal ball, there is no way that a teller is able to tell this.
I do wonder what kind of scam people thought that I was running. I had my driveway redone, and got a cashier’s check to pay the contractor. Apparently, the bank had a “printing error”, where they somehow printed two checks. They shredded one, and cancelled the other. So, the check that I gave to the contractors was a bad check.
Now, what is interesting in all of this, is that I had already given them the first half of the payment, and in all the confusion of trying to work out the bank’s error, they asked if I wanted to do a stop payment on that one. I was very adamant that they did not, as the contractor was already a bit upset about me giving him a bad check, I didn’t really want to then go reversing the check that he had cashed.
You have a contract with the back when you open an account.
I asked this earlier: why couldn’t you bring it to the bank where it was originally issued? (I realize that this is intentionally made difficult by having it drawn on a local bank far from where it was mailed, but presume that you could travel to its location). If you ask them to negotiate it for you, and give you the funds, would that be a problem? It is, of course, possible that it wasn’t actually issued by them (maybe it’s a forgery), but aren’t they supposed to know if it’s one of their checks? What if you offered to wait a few days so they could verify that it came from one of their accounts, and was actually issued by their customer?
ETA: is this what happened in the article about the bank cited above? My impression was that the person went to their own bank, but upon reflection they may have gone to the issuing bank (or it was the same bank). Maybe I’ve asked a dumb question.
It would not be be worth the time and/or cost of travel.
After extensive discussion among the moderators, we’re revising the warning you’ve been given. We’ve now seen two instances in which you gave people dubious advice about scams:
Case #1. You advised someone to deposit a check he had been sent out of the blue for what was apparently a sizable amount. This has the hallmarks of a scam. Your advice was foolish. Colibri instructed you to “not advise people to do things that may well be illegal.” Depositing the check would probably not have been illegal, so Colibri’s instruction to you was not well stated; nonetheless, the staff believes he was right to admonish you.
Case #2 (the present case). You advised someone who had received a suspicious check to consult with their bank. You got a warning for failing to obey mod instructions. This warning was off base. Telling someone to consult with their bank is not illegal. However, bankers do not have magical powers that enable them to sniff out scams. The check could be legitimate and still be part of a scam. So when you say, “If they say “It’s good, deposit it!” then fine”, you’re giving foolish advice. (We say this after consulting with a veteran bank executive.) It’s not fine. This case, like case #1, has the hallmarks of a scam. The safest advice would be to do nothing with the check and have nothing further to do with Dr. X.
Thus this revised warning: Do not give anyone on this board, in this thread or any other thread, advice of any kind about scams. We don’t trust you to give sound advice on such matters, even when what you’re proposing seems sensible on its face. Failure to abide by the above instructions will be grounds for revocation of your posting privileges.
Every bank has a funds availability policy (crafted around Reg CC). If you start out with $25 in your acct & deposit a large, private check, you won’t get access to those funds right away. After the deposit, your ledger balance goes up much quicker than your available balance, IOW, the ledger balance includes the pending-but-not-yet-cleared item(s). You can’t withdrawal or spend that deposit until those funds move to your available balance.
The problem is the scammers either:
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forge a Cashier’s cheque, which may appear at first to be legitimate to the teller; so the scamee will have access to the funds, until the forgery is detected when it is processed at the destination bank. (In Catch Me If You Can Abgnale would put the routing codes for a bank across the country on the fraudulent cheques, thus ensuring it would be weeks -in the good old days - before the problem was discovered)
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or they write a regular, non-cashier’s cheque and rely on the scamee having sufficient alternate funds to cover the money he has to send back until the cheque clears. When it doesn’t, the scamee goes into overdraft
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or the bank trusts the scamee as a customer in long standing and allows him to overdraw that amount of the cashed cheque at the bank’s standard usurious rates, knowing he is good for repayment eventually somehow. When the cheque bounces, well, the target is overdrawn.
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Worst case, the scamee for some reason does not follow through and the scammer is no worse off than before.
One article a few years ago on the subject claimed that it can take, in the worst case, up to a year for a cashier’s check on a foreign bank to clear. Typically, it will be faster, say a month or two, but a year is possible.
sometimes the deposit (by cheque, transfer, etc) will be cleared , and then you may be just forwarding it to another bank account . Money laundering effectively.
Another scam is the fake international transfer , or fake money launder. They are getting the cash from someone else X on the basis they are going to follow X’s instructions, and to hide their tracks they are using you to money launder it , but not following X’s instructions.
In this state the criminal offence is “recklessly handling proceeds of crime”. That is, you don’t have to be aware of it being proceeds of crime, they don’t have to show you were intentionally money laundering…
So yes being scammed can also make you look like part of the scammer gang ,and anyway they only have to show you were money laundering “recklessly”… that is, without having anything like a contract ,or recognized type of employment, with a legitimate enterprise…