Some common scam links re: puppy transactions:
http://www.bbb.org/blog/2013/08/bbb-alerts-consumers-to-online-puppy-scams/
I recently posted something on Craigslist and I got a response to the effect of “I want the gizmo but I can’t pick it up till next week. I’ll send you a check for the asking price plus $50 to hold it for me until I can get there.”
I assumed it was a bad check scam, and I didn’t give the guy my street address. But I wasn’t sure what the guy’s next move would have been. Had I taken the check, would he have come back the next day and said, “Oops, something came up and I can’t get it after all. Can you send me back the purchase price and keep the holding fee?” Or is it more complicated than that?
thats the bait - what you actually get in the check will be similar to the OPs story.
its unlikely that they are going to do this for $50.
Even if the bank would perform this service for a stranger on the phone, which is doubtful, the scamster would just tell them “Sure, it’s legit”. All a bank can tell you with any certainty is whether there are funds in the account to cover that amount at that precise point in time, nothing more.
^This. There are many circumstances where the check has plenty of time to “clear” before being identified as fraudulent - forged signature/endorsement and wrong routing number being just a few examples.
Gotta love that Labrador Deceiver weighs in on a deceptive scam about a puppy. 
Yup, scam.
Over payment, sketchy arrangements (how is the local relative going to get the puppy to the supposed buyer’s home in some far off state? Can’t just ship the pup via FedEx. I’m not sure I was able to follow to which state it was going, FL, OH, or TX, but none of them are a short drive & there’s probably extra cost if they’re flying with a dog. After all, this is a mutt, not some rare purebred for a bargain price. Why not find one locally.
Do not cash this check. Even if you don’t send them the ‘overpayment’ back, your niece will still be on the hook for any bounce fee that her bank charges her when it is finally revealed to be a scam. That may only be $15 or $20 but why throw even that amount away by giving it to the bank.
Of course there’s issues with CASH ONLY too, such as they fear a armed hold-up or they perform a armed hold up. Or the money is counterfeit.
For most smaller CL transactions, a check should be fine.
Spiderman is right- Do not cash this check.
I have another question in relation to this.
Is there a way to find out if the senders address is the actual address that the envelope was sent from?
If the scammers are sending mail via FedEx I doubt that they are using their real address, is there a way to tell just from a shipping label?
Probably not. If it was sent directly from a FedEx store, I’m not sure if the sender has to prove identification to clerk on the other side of the counter.
Also, what hasn’t been mentioned, this could be a double scam. The first one is money that everyone has been focused. The other is the dog itself. What happens to the puppy? Will it be adopted and have a good life, or end up (1) as live food for a large snake, (2) ripped to shreds by a fighting dog in training, or (3) something else?
'Round these parts many, many people have to go through an adoption process before adopting a dog or cat.
Of course, you risk the same things having a yard sale, but in reality, the risk is likely in the realm of teensy-tiny. When I sold an old washer-dryer set for $100 on CL, I was mostly concerned that the buyer wouldn’t show up after all. For the sale of the bike, I’d be more inclined to want to meet the seller at the bank - plus someone is there to notarize the title or bill of sale (OK, that may be a bit of an overreaction…)
The dog is at no risk, because there is nobody coming to pick up the dog. They aren’t interested in the dog, they want the niece to cash the forged check and send them the money. This person will ever ever in a million years show up in person to pick up the dog, or washing machine, or beanie baby offered for sale. The scammer doesn’t live in Anchorage and doesn’t have an accomplice in Anchorage.
The scammer finds ads offering medium-priced goods all over the country, Fedexes a forged check for way over the offer price, and when the overage amount is noticed they blame their secretary or whoever, say to cash the check and send them the cash difference, plus keep a little extra. If you call the bank to see if the account has funds the bank will say yes. This is because the scammer isn’t writing a rubber check against their own bank account, they’re sending you a forged check against someone else’s bank account. So cashing the check or waiting for the check to clear won’t work, because the check will clear. And then when the accountholder finds out they’ve been robbed you’ll have to pay them back, you don’t get to keep their money just because someone fraudulently told you to keep it, or because you gave the money away.
This scam is usually run on items for sale that can’t just be put in a box and shipped across country, the scammers don’t actually want the item, they want their forged check cashed and having the item mailed to their physical location is an additional risk. If they did ask for the item to be shipped they’d just give a random address far away from where they are actually located.
Banks are usually happy to provide information.
I received a check for 3,500 dollars that I though was sketchy (the circumstances, not the check). I called the issuing bank. A very helpful woman asked me to read the routing numbers off to her. I only got a few digits in before she stopped me and said ‘It’s a fake.’
The checks look real. You deposit them and it can take a month or more before it comes back. Then you get dinged with the bad check (some banks will charge you), they take the money out of your account, which may make checks of yours bounce.
I’m not sure why you’re bringing the value of the check into it, since neither I nor the post I responded to mentioned it. And there were lots of red flags aside from the value of the check. That’s why the OP started the thread in the first place.
If someone had said “Eh, no one’s going to send you a $100 fake check to scam you out of a puppy, just deposit it”, then sure. No comment. But that’s not what the post I responded to said. It said that if you’re worried about a check being legitimate, to deposit it and see if it clears. And that’s terrible advice regardless of the amount of the check. Because it doesn’t help you verify anything, and it might make things worse.
The OP says the issue is resolved; see this post for details.
The post you responded to was a response to the OP who said that the check was supposed to be for $100. That response was made with the assumption that the check would be for that amount.
It doesn’t really matter, since we appear to be on the same page.
To be fair, your scenario is completely different than the one I responded to, but I will amend my answer to say “All a bank can tell you with any certainty is whether there are funds in the account to cover that amount at that precise point in time and verify the MICR line is correct, nothing more.”
This is not true. As I stated upthread, I get calls every single month from my bank because they are responding to an inquiry from another bank, a check cashing service, etc. asking if a check that has been issued from the company I work for is legitimate. I don’t know if it’s because of our older accounting software, we have cheap looking checks or what, but we get calls. We also cut a ton of checks every month.
It goes like this:
My phone rings. It’s our bank. They say they want to verify a check. They give me a payee, check number and amount. I tell them yes, I wrote that check and it’s ok. Sometimes they tell me they have another bank calling them. Other times it’s a check cashing service.
If they wanted to see if we had enough money in the account to cover the check, they wouldn’t need to call me. They could look it up on their own. What they are doing is making sure I issued that check and it’s legit.
The bank can’t tell anyone else for sure that I issued the check. Only I can do that.
I’m not sure we are (although we seem to be just repeating ourselves at this point, so I’ll drop it after this post). I’m saying the advice to deposit the check and see if it clears is bad regardless of the value of the check. You (I think) are saying that the advice is reasonable if the check is for a small amount.
On the sixth day you would be no safer than on the first day. That five-day hold gives a safety margin for most common transactions, but does not comprise an absolute guarantee. A well devised forgery may take weeks or months to finally be revealed as bogus, at which point the depositer of the check (i.e., you) is responsible for any monies paid out on it.
Having “the check clear” only helps if the valid issuer of a valid check wants to put a “stop payment” on it. If the check is a forgery, having it “clear” means little, they can & will take the funds back.
Yes, I think almost everyone is saying the same things.
Depositing the check and ‘waiting for it to clear’, calling the issuing bank and verifying that the funds exist, cashing the check at the issuing bank, and so on, only protect you from the problem of the account not having sufficient funds. If you suspect the check will bounce this would protect you.
But if the check is forged–that is, the account holder did not authorize the check–then this won’t protect you. The bank can verify that the account has funds to pay the check, but that doesn’t mean anything if the person who wrote the check is not the account holder. If Bob sends Carol a check written against Alice’s account, and Carol cashes the check, and then we find out that Bob didn’t have authority to write checks against Alice’s account, Carol will have to refund the money to Alice. It doesn’t matter that Carol gave Bob a package of goods, or gave Bob a bunch of cash. Carol can’t keep Alice’s money just because Bob gave her Alice’s money.
As for the advice that it would be fine if it was only for a small amount like $100, it seems to me that the argument is just that Carol will take the risk of having to repay the $100 if it turns out to be a fraud, because it’s not worth worrying about for that amount of money. Assuming this is absent other indications of fraud. A guy showing up to my house to pick up my old washing machine and hands me a check for $50, and the check is written against a local bank? I’ll just deposit it. If it turns out to be a bad check, then I’m out an old washing machine, and don’t get paid for it. If someone from New York fedexes me a check written against a bank in Florida for a washing machine I own in Washington? Not going to deposit that check.