Hello, here is what is happening. Yesterday I got a check in the mail from a company based in New Hampshire which I had never heard of before. The check was for about $2600. The attached letter said it was for a mystery shopping job and had instructions on how to handle it. Specifically it said to deposit the check and then go to a Western Union and do a cash advance for about $1700 to Address X, and also to take $100 and go shopping at Best Buy or Target and in both cases to contact a person named in the letter and give him my report on the customer service at Western Union and the store I chose and supposedly the balance is mine to keep. This pinged my bullshit meter for obvious reasons. I put the check aside intending to shred it but then I got distracted and so it is still on my table. Anyway I am wondering if there’s anything else I should do with this check that is is there a government agency I should report it to.
Please don’t bother telling me that it’s a scam; that is obvious. If I were to deposit the check what would surely happen is that the money would never reach my account and I’d get a huge chargeback.
Any thoughts on whether it’s worth reporting this to the FBI or whatever? Thank you.
My spouse got a $50,000 check in the mail. No explanation. She asked the manager at a local bank and was told that this happened about twice a month. They had a person looking into it. The bank took the check and we never hear anymore about it.
Whoa! Forget my advice! I didn’t think that you would be arrested if you were honestly trying to cash a check. I wonder how it would work if you told the bank teller up front “Can you tell me if this is a real check? I’m afraid it might be bogus.”
Similar thing happened to me, but with a fake money order from what I thought was a job offer. I turned it into USPS because that’s how it was shipped and where the counterfeit money orders supposedly came from.
You can call the issuing bank and they will tell you if it’s real or not.
We got one of those when we were trying to sell a pool table. The ex didn’t want to believe it was a scam. I called the issuing bank. Lady on the phone had me read the routing number to her. I got 3 numbers in and she stopped me and said ‘It’s a fake’.
I don’t get what these people did that was illegal. I only read the first one, but what is illegal about attempting to cash a check that you got in the mail? Presumably the bank could tell it was a fake; why was the response to cuff her instead of telling her, “sorry, fake check”?
Not always. A guy I used to work for got a check that he was 95% sure was fake, but the bank said it was fine and handed over the money without complaint. It was six months before the bank figured it out and came back asking for the money - fortunately he still had it, as he thought something of that nature might happen and had been content to sit on it for a year or two to make sure.
You don’t need a teller for that. You can just google “routing number” + the, um, routing number which is what I did. I’m not sure what I would have done if it had been a valid number as the next obvious step would have been to try to verify the account number but I doubt the bank is going to answer that question unless you can prove up front it is your number and asking the question would make you seem like the one trying to pull something.
I don’t know how it is in the US, but here, a bank won’t cash a cheque unless you have an account with them*. If there’s any problem with the cheque, it all comes out of YOUR account. Banks invented “cover your ass.”