We are waiting for a check and found out today that despite repeated confirmations of our address, rather than sending it to 123 E Fake St. It got sent to 12 Fake St which doesn’t exist. I have no hope of tracking the original check as it was mailed over 2 months ago but to make sure it isn’t in someone else’s hands, what happens to mail sent to an address that simply does not exist?
If it was sent as first-class mail, it should have been returned to the sender as non-deliverable.
Let’s just say, the level of incompetence at this bank is beyond belief. If that happened, no note was ever made of it so now we need to wait while the stop payment goes through and the check reissued.
So difficult to keep this thread FQ and not the Pit.
People make mistakes and banks are run by people. Is there a local branch nearby? I would make an appointment with the bank manager, explain the situation to him or her, and politely ask for an expedited check reissue. If you don’t appear angry or pissed off, there’s a better chance they may accommodate you. I would think banks hate to lose good customers for stupid reasons like this.
At a certain point, when you verify your address numerous times, it ceases to be a mistake that they have the wrong one in their system.
All branches are on the East Coast and impossible to get in touch with corporate even via email. So I filed a complaint with the Comptroller of the Currency. I have found that if a bank cares, that gets the conversation started when working with the branch/CSAs fails.
Tell us what happens in case it ever happens to us. I fortunately have a local branch I can complain to.
It’ll probably be 8 weeks until we know if the check was mailed right unless the shutdown ends before then.
I had that happen recently, but with a check from a contractor rather than a bank. The misaddressed envelope was indeed returned to the sender, although it took about 3 weeks. (What happened to it after the contractor received it, and why they owed me money in the first place, is a whole long story that would be off topic here.)
I had this happen to me a few years ago, well I was getting the mail, not it being lost. I live at 123 Main Street, I started getting mail for 123 Real Street. Real street was miles away but there was no 123. I sent it back, but it kept coming back to me. I looked up the person and their address was 56789 Real Street, so it was all messed up. Why it kept coming to me I don’t know, but after a bit it stopped. It was only one company, a bank I think, so I guess it got sorted out, but I got a few different letters over a month or so.
The bank now says that since it was an incorrect address it was probably never delivered so we don’t have to wait for the stop payment and we should get the check (at the right address?) within a week.
I’ll believe it when I am holding the check.
With the sender being a bank, if it came back, it went to the mailroom. Depending upon what else was in the envelope, it might not be easy to figure out which department issued the check. If it goes to Dept A & it’s not them, then they need to send it to Dept B; all the while it sits on someone’s desk or gets buried & no one is looking into it.
If the bank has a branch anywhere nearby and the check amount is at all significant, I’d be inclined to say “I’ll be there this afternoon to collect the check.” (Probably omitting “Fool me twice: shame on me.”)
I don’t think that’s the case:
(The implication being that @Saint_Cad isn’t on the east coast.)
Gotta love the wife. She is the one that made this call and I found out when they said we should have the check in a week, she asked them, “What are you going to say when I call in two weeks and the check hasn’t arrived?”
Haven’t they heard of electronic transfer?
I live in a small New England state at 30 FamousWarHero Street in the city of Providence. There is a 30 FamousWarHero Street in the city of North Providence a few miles away. There is a 30 FamousWarHero Street in the city of Pawtucket, just a few blocks away. In fact, there is a FamousWarHero Street, Court, or Avenue in nearly every one of 39 towns near here. A fair amount of mail arrives here anomalously addressed - right city, wrong zip, etc - or with an apparently good address just misdelivered - and we attempt to scribble a correction on the envelope before handing it back to the USPS - who generally take 2 days to bring it right back to us. We finally learned to Sharpie over the black bar code printed on the front edge of the envelope - to little or no success - and were told by a mailperson that ‘oh the black bar code doesn’t do anything - it’s repeated on the back in ink that can only be read by UV light’ which may be snake oil but there is often a just barely visible red/pink version of the bar code on some envelopes…and of THOSE that we’ve obscured and tossed back into the mail-ström none have made it back to our shores.
Since we’re branching out a little here, I can add that we denied a student registration because the address given was shown by Powerschool on a map to be outside our district. Apparently, she lives at 123 Fake Street, city, IL, and Powerschool was showing 123 Fake Street, city, IN. Same address, same street, different city, and even different state. I researched and got Google pictures of both addresses to prove her real and stated address actually exists. Her child now attends here even though her file is tagged by Powerschool as “out of district”. Very weird.
Addendum: Powerschool gets it map information from Google, so the error originates there, not in our system.
Maybe - I had a check sent to me from a bank a few years ago. The address was correct. I had a tracking number and it never showed up at my house or showed up as delivered. The bank stopped payment and I requested a new check ( which involved a notarized form, so it took a day or two). I get the new check - and two or three weeks later, I get the original. Which had nothing wrong with the address. No idea what happened with it.
I asked. “We can’t do that.”
That sounds like a completely different situation in which the letter in question was apparently lost, misplaced, or misdirected within the postal system—and was then subsequently found and delivered, not that the letter was undeliverable.