Bank records don’t prove he wasn’t paid. They just show the payment wasn’t deposited in a particular account or accounts. And it’s not enough to show the dealer never got the money - he has to show I didn’t pay. If the cashier’s check was stolen after I gave it to the dealer and cashed by the thief , it’s not my problem
ETA - and there probably are transactions around $25K on the dealer’s bank statement from the people who finance cars, so that may not even work.
They do if the bank still has the $25,000, or if they show the check was returned and paid back to the buyer, which is the kind of hypothetical situation we’re talking about.
It wouldn’t even go to a trial if something like that was uncovered, unless the buyer was a massive idiot (which many criminals are). The buyer would scramble to cover his ass and avoid further consequences.
But let’s go with that: okay, maybe it was stolen and cashed by a thief.
So we’d sure like for you to ask your bank: has it been cashed? If so, please give us permission to access info to help us find the thief who cashed it; betcha he had to show a photo ID, and betcha he signed the back of the check and maybe he had to put an inky thumbprint on the front of it — and maybe he was dumb enough to deposit it into his account, can you imagine?
And if no thief has yet cashed it, well, then, just have the bank cancel that check and issue a replacement, as agreed in the contract; please and thank you.
Oh, you meant the issuing bank’s record - I misunderstood. Absolutely that would work - if the dealer knew which bank issued the check. You know, like if they made a copy of the check they received. Which means they acknowledge receiving the check and takes us back to what I said earlier :
Which also applies to a stolen check.
It wasn’t a car, but I had a drug-addled client walk out with product without payment 6 years ago.
I have a very strict “no billing” policy. This woman was making a purchase that came to $8. She was digging in her purse frantically but had left her $$ at home, I guess. Frustrated, she bolted out the door. We knew her name, address, and phone number.
I called the state police (no local force where my business is located). He recognized her name and was able to pull up her driver’s license picture on his car screen. We ID’d her. He told us he knew her well from several other situations involving drugs.
I missed a day of work to testify. She cleaned up nice and I thought I’d be laughed out of court, as she looked prim and proper while I was wearing jeans and a t shirt. She was found guilty, which in addition to fines and costs caused her to violate parole on a prior charge. She threatened to kill me as we left the magistrate’s court.
I received all sorts of paperwork about “Pennsylvania Crime Victim Help”. There were forms that I could have submitted to get restitution ($8) that I did not bother with.
In the case of the check, it doesn’t matter if the check is in your pocket when you walk out the door or fell behind the filing cabinet or ate by the dog.
Did the check get cashed or not?
You can’t just point to the bill of sale and say that’s proof you paid them. You paid them how? With the check? Then why isn’t the check cashed?
You can only get a free car in this situation if you can keep the car and keep the money. But with the check not cashed, how do you keep the money? Your proof that you paid them is the check you wrote. They didn’t get the money. That is obvious from the bank records.
Again, if you write a check to a store, and they lose the check, then one of three things can happen. They will demand you write them a new check, they can demand you return the merchandise, or they can forget about it because it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
If you wrote a check for $10 they might just decide to give up. If you wrote a check for $25,000 they’re not going to just give up.
Again, the proof that you paid by check is not that you walked out of the store with the merchandise, the proof is when the check clears. If the check doesn’t ever clear, for whatever reason, then you didn’t pay.
Now, you might perjure yourself and insist that you paid with cash. That’s one option. It’s also fraud.
The other option is to insist, “Hey, I gave you the check, if you lost it that’s on you.” But that won’t work. They didn’t get paid, the check was never cashed, the funds are still in the bank account. If it was a cashier’s check, the funds aren’t even in your bank account any more, so that won’t do you any good. You’ll have to go down to the bank and ask them to cancel the cashier’s check and give you back your money. How’s that going to work for you in court? How would that be different than you paying for the car by cashier’s check, and then driving right over to the bank and asking them to refund the check to you before the dealership can deposit the check?
This sort of thing is fraud. Same thing as writing a personal check for $25,000 when you know you only have $5 in the account. That is fraud.
Is there a way you can get a free car through fraud? Maybe, but it’s going to be tough. The more interesting question is whether you can get a free car due to the mistakes of the dealership in not getting that check in hand before giving you the keys. And the answer here is no. You can drag your heels all you want and tell them you’re not going to write them a new check, but when things go to court you’re either going to have to write them a new check, or give them back the car. And this is true whether the sales guy made a mistake in not asking for the check, the cashier made a mistake and put the check in the wrong pile, the cleaning lady made a mistake and put the check in the trash, or the bookkeeper made a mistake and lost the check.
The check wasn’t cashed. The dealership doesn’t have it. You’re going to have to give them their money, you can’t keep both the car and the money. Yes, if it was a stack of cash then it’s going to be harder for the dealership to prove they don’t have the cash, and so it would be easier for you to lie about it and defraud them and get away with it. But with the check there’s no way lying would do you any good, because the check was not cashed.
Again, in civil cases, litigants are entitled to the tools of discovery. If the dealer does not know which bank issued the check, he can force the purchaser to testify under oath which bank he drew the check from.
But again, in your example, the dealer acknowledges receiving a check. How much information can the dealer demand if his case consists of “She didn’t pay me. Yes, she has a bill of sale that says she paid in full, yes, we titled the car in her name, gave her the keys and let her drive away without her giving me a check or cash or a credit card. Just trust me that I keep good enough records to know that the $25K I’m missing is actually missing, and it’s because she didn’t pay me - it couldn’t possibly be that I let someone else drive away with a car that they didn’t pay for and it couldn’t be that one of my employees stole it. Oh, and the bill of sale, changing the title, etc shouldn’t affect your opinion of how well I keep my records.”
Does he now become entitled to dig through all my bank and credit card accounts just because he says I didn’t pay him?
It seems to me that what you’re saying is that if I bought a car from Shady Joe for $25K* in cash that I did not take out of a bank account, Shady Joe could say I didn’t pay - forget that I titled it to her, forget that I gave her a bill of sale that says she paid in full, forget that I gave her the keys, forget that I let her drive it away. And because it wasn’t withdrawn from a bank and therefore I have no proof of payment except for the bill of sale he gave me, I will have to pay a second time if he sues me. Is that what you mean to say?
Yes, I know Shady Joe is lying in this example. In every payment dispute someone is lying or at least mistaken and the trick is to figure out who. But it seems like you’re saying that Shady Joe/ the dealer/my mechanic claiming that I gave him no payment at all is enough for me to lose because the fact that he gave me a bill of sale/receipt that says I paid in full is not enough to prove that I paid in full. And that’s what I’m not understanding. If he says I gave him a cashier’s check and he lost it, or if he says I gave him a personal check and it bounced, or I paid via credit card and I initiated a chargeback - those are different issues.
Are you going to perjure yourself in court or not?
Yeah, you can lie and say you paid in cash. That’s lying, it is perjury, and it’s also fraud.
You could try telling the truth…you had the check, but nobody asked for it, so you walked out without paying. That’s not perjury and it’s not fraud, but the problem here is that you’re admitting you didn’t pay, which means the judge is going to make you pay, or make you give back the car.
I don’t know why you think the dealership losing the check puts them in a better position than if they forget to ask for the check. The price of the car is $25,000. It’s not “whatever I gave them when they signed over the title.” Did you pay them or not? If not, the judge is going to make you pay.
Sure it is if I didn’t pay. Suppose I really did pay in cash and Shady Joe is lying when he says I didn’t pay him at all? Does he win or is the bill of sale, etc enough for me to win? And if it’s enough to win when Shady Joe is lying , why isn’t it enough when I’m lying? It’s the same evidence- the only difference is who is telling the truth about the evidence. Of course, I don’t deserve to win if I’m lying but that’s a different issue.
Because losing the check explains why they gave me the bill of sale that says I paid in full , the title and the keys, etc even though they didn’t actually get the money and that account is more likely to be true than the one where they give me everything without receiving payment in any form.
That’s not what happened. You would by lying, and they would find out. They have a right to look at any information relevant to their claim. And their claim would be based on forensic accounting, and that would give them access to all of your financial records which would show that you are lying. For decades now any large amount of cash would be carefully recorded, and maybe not even accepted. You are only in court at all because you refused to voluntarily provide the information about your cashier’s check in the first place which would have been asked when the dealership had no idea what happened with the payment, probably suspecting their own employees instead of you, but your refusal to cooperate put the cross hairs on you, and that alone will have a judge ordering you to turn over your financial information.
Once again, the bill of sale is just a piece of paper. It’s one bit of evidence that can easily be faked or altered. Your refusal to cooperate by itself is evidence that overrides your piece of paper. The dealership’s accountants override your piece of paper.`
So when the dealer says you didn’t pay and you petulantly say “Prove it!”, they will take you to court, present the prima facia evidence that you did not pay, and the judge will allow them subpoena your financial records. They need only the barest of evidence to get that order.
Consider this circumstance, you are driving through a parking lot and someone backs out of a parking space right in front of you and you hit the rear end of their car. You go to court and say it’s their responsibility because you had the right of way. You’ll win if there is no other evidence. But if there are witness or security video that shows the car was very slowly backing out of the parking space and you were speeding through the parking lot then you will be found responsible because of your reckless driving.
There is rarely one piece of overwhelming evidence in case like the OP presents. It is the totality of the evidence that counts, not any one piece of evidence. And once again, the totality of the evidence will show you did not pay for that car because you didn’t pay for that car.
I’m not saying that Shady Joe or the dealer automatically wins by making the claim. The will win because the entirety of the evidence will show the seller actually did not receive the money. The purchaser has the receipt/bill of sale. That is one piece of very good evidence that he indeed gave the $25k.
But the dealer can come back and say that they have a complicated process and they do the paperwork before they get the check, and although usual policy is to take the check before delivering the bill of sale, it seems in this instance the salesman did not do that.
If I am a judge that explanation sounds reasonable to me (and it is reasonable because it is exactly what happened) and now I look to you to provide these records to prove that you paid. And whatever you say will be proven to be false, because you in fact did not pay.
I paid by cashiers check. Well, lets go to your bank and see if it was cashed and who cashed it. Oh it is not cashed? Cancel it and get a new one. You owe dealer $25k minus expenses for reprocessing.
I paid by cash. Ok, where did you get $25k in cash? As noted above, banks keep records of withdrawals of over $10k and structured withdrawals over that amount. So, lets say that you argue that you are just like your grandparents, don’t trust banks, and keep all of your cash at home.
Really, okay? How much more cash do you have at home? How long did it take you to save up $25k? Did you cash your paycheck every two weeks and take all of the cash home? Do you pay your electric/water/cell phone bill in cash also? Do you have a bank account at all?
One lie will lead to another and you’ll end up without the car and using the $25k that you have to hire an attorney for a variety of criminal charges.
I’m not understanding what the legal strategy is for people who think they might get a free car.
So you’re in court. The dealership guy stands up and says “Hey, we didn’t get paid for this car. We wanna get paid. Where’s our check? We don’t know. I guess the sales guy made a mistake. We want him to pay us for the car.”
Then the judge turns to you and says, “Well, what’s your story?”
Are you going to say, “Hey, they signed the title over to me and didn’t ask to be paid, which means they gave me a free car.”? Or just sit there and say nothing?
When you do that, what do you think the judge will say? “Nice loophole. OK, the car is yours now.”
He’s not going to say that. He’s going to say, “Not asking for the check was a mistake. You want the car, you’re going to have to pay for it. So if you won’t pay them, I’m going to tell the cops they can seize the car and give it back to them, plus make you pay some amount $X for forcing them to sue you.”
This also isn’t a criminal trial, so not putting on a case is not an option. If you don’t explain your side of the story, the judge is going to make a summary judgement for the dealership.
If your plan is to lie about what happened, that’s a different story again. But it opens you up to perjury and fraud charges, so you probably don’t want to do that. So I’m going with the option that your legal strategy won’t involve perjury. You’re going to try to figure out a way to get a free car legally, due to the dealer’s mistake, and not due to fraud on your part.
But this won’t work. There’s a common misconception that signing a contract is what makes a contract. But that’s not true. A contract is an agreement between two people. The document you sign is just a memorialization of that contract. You agree to pay the dealership $25,000, and they agreed to give you the car. You didn’t own the car when they signed the papers, you owned the car when they get the $25,000.
It is true that mistakes in documentation might make it harder to prove that a contract existed, or that it was carried out. But signing the papers isn’t what makes it a contract, agreeing to the contract is what makes it a contract. Did you agree to pay them $25,000 for the car? Yes or no. Did they give you the car? Yes or no. Did you pay them $25,000 for the car? Yes or no.
The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it assumes that clerical errors never happen.
But the claim that the guy who thinks he can get the car for free makes relies on the car dealership making a clerical error.
This is not a very consistent position to take.
One error is “dealership employee got the check, correctly issued the paperwork, but somehow later lost the check.” The other error is “dealership employee didn’t get the check, incorrectly issued paperwork as though he had.” They’re almost the same thing, so having the paperwork that should be issued on sale is very weak evidence in this case. Because there’s a very clear explanation for having the paperwork but not having paid: clerical error. And it’s an explanation you’ll have to bring up when you claim that you paid!
That’s all before we get into the really bad plan of turning this into a conspiracy to commit fraud by having someone else buy another car and hope that the paperwork gets confused.
The only way I can see someone getting away with this is if some employee at the car dealership is engaged in some kind of internal fraud or embezzlement, and investigating this missing check causes that fraud to come to light, and there’s either enough evidence of other fraud or the forensic accountant/DA is slightly lazy and this loss ends up getting pinned on that employee along with lots of other losses. I wouldn’t pin a lot of hope on this scenario, but it’s maybe plausible.
Exactly. Another facet of this is that pretty early on in this process, the dealership is probably going to accept that they must have misplaced the check, and just ask you for a new one. If you refuse and go to court, at some point the judge is going to ask you a pretty pointed question about why you didn’t just go to the bank and get them a new check. Think carefully about how you’re going to answer that question. “I thought I might get the car for free”, for example, is probably a bad answer. Judges aren’t very understanding when it comes to people wasting their time trying to scam people through the judicial system or refusing totally reasonable requests.
Something of a zombie thread, but it’s MY zombie thread, and I finally found out what recourse one would have as the recipient of a cashier’s check that was lost before it was cashed (as the car dealership would have been, in the scenario I described in my OP).
TLDR summary: the crux of my original supposition, that a cashier’s check is “basically the same as cash”, is not true. So long as the dealership was documented as expecting or receiving a cashier’s check from me, they could always get the money. Which is why these things exist.
Had I truly been paying in “cash cash”, like a stack of C-notes, that the salesman forgot to take while giving me a receipt and the car keys, they’d indeed be SOL once I could show receipt of payment (“well, how should I know what you did with the cash after I handed it over?”). I talked this over with a cop and a lawyer friend of mine, who both asked, “so where is the crime being committed that would warrant further investigation? You have proof they accepted your money, they lost the money, how can they require you to pay again?”
But this is one of several reasons why many car dealerships wouldn’t actually take a stack of greenbacks for payment, particularly over the $10K threshold which requires reporting to the IRS (paperwork… gaaah!), and I don’t know if this particular one would have. (In my case, IIRC the balance was something like $12,000.)
What happens with lost cashier’s checks:
The cashier’s check had a Payee made out to it, which the bank retained a copy of - in this case, the dealership’s name. They know who was supposed to get this money.
If I had legitimately decided not to use a certified check drawn from my account, like if I backed out of the big purchase decision, I could return it cancelled with “not used for purpose intended” written on it and the funds would be released back into my account. But the bank would still have a record of the check having been issued and subsequently canceled, and on what dates, including the originally designated payee.
A payee who has lost a certified check before depositing it can file a declaration of loss with the issuing bank, which may require up to a 90 day waiting period before releasing the funds to the payee.
In my scenario, even with the receipt from the dealership showing that I’d paid in full, as long as they had any documentation or proof that my payment was supposed to be via certified check, the dealership could demand that I give the name of the issuing bank for the certified check that was “lost”.
There would be no reason for me not to do so, if it were a legitimate case of my having given them the check to the salesman who then misplaced it; my refusal to do so would be grounds for criminal suspicion (that I hadn’t actually paid). And of course if I did tell them the bank, they’d be able to discover that the check was issued and then canceled, proving lack of payment.
So what was the look on the guy’s face for? Not that the dealership would never get the money, or even that in his mind a 90 day wait might be bad for him… It would probably just plain be bad for his career to look so confused as to forget to take payment from a customer.
Now, I don’t really know if this particular dealership WOULD have taken $12,000 as a stack of bills. If so, and if my receipt did not indicate that I had paid with a cashier’s check but just that I’d “paid in full”, then maybe (had I been the nefarious type) I could have claimed to have always intended to pay, and then did pay, with bills. It would be a plausible and defensible scenario, as I have personally sold a car in a private sale and received $9500 in cash, so it’s quite natural that I might simply turn around and use that cash (plus a bit more) to buy a newer car at a dealership.
But the fact is that when I made the agreement to buy the car the day before, I gave them a deposit from my credit card and said I’d come after the car was prepped “to pay in full with a cashier’s check”. If I’d said it’d be with a stack of hundred dollar bills, maybe they’d have told me that it wouldn’t be accepted.
And even if they WOULD have taken a stack of bills, it’s also possible the forms I signed that day said that I’d be paying by cashier’s check (because I had), meaning the whole bit about how they could demand that I tell them the bank so they could file a lost cashier’s check claim with them would apply. I don’t remember any more.
Anything, be it dealership policy, the sales sheet with deposit/balance info, or written on the receipt I got saying how I had paid, that showed that they were expecting a cashier’s check from me as payment, would get me in hot water if they followed up with a lost check claim with the bank and I didn’t cooperate.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t really matter if I’d redeposited the check, as I could just re-issue the check and fork that one over if they asked; they’d have no grounds to pursue any sort of criminal charges, even if they suspected I had tried something funny they couldn’t prove it and certainly wouldn’t bother to do so.
So there really wasn’t any downside (from my POV) to my walking out with my check and seeing what happened, except of course for almost certainly coming off as a major jerk and potential fraudster in the end. “I paid you with a stack of bills.” “No, you didn’t.” “Yes, I did!” “No, that’s impossible because of (one of the above three or four proofs)”. “Oh… Right… Here’s your check again, haha!”
But the likelihood that this dealership had a policy that accepted large amounts of cash, and also didn’t mention a certified check anywhere in their sales paperwork, is practically nil.
I work at a car dealership, and there’s just no way that you would have legally or otherwise gotten away with that. They would have noticed had you said nothing and drove off. If you insisted that you paid and have documents to prove it, they would be able to prove that you hadn’t paid the remaining 25k balance due to bank records on both sides. And they’d repo the car.
Never underestimate the ability of anybody to make mistakes. I once bought a motorcycle from a dealership and paid with a personal check. I made a mistake and wrote the wrong amount on the check, and the finance person made a mistake and accepted it. I think I wrote two hundred and fifty and no/100 instead of two thousand two hundred and fifty and no/100 or something like that.
Over the course of the next day or two this kind of bubbled up in my head, so I looked at the check beneath the one I wrote (no carbons), and was pretty sure I’d written the wrong amount. I called and talked to the finance person directly. The check hadn’t been deposited, and she verified I’d made a mistake. I went back and swapped a correct check for the incorrect one.
The finance person was very grateful, and perfectly happy to not get anybody else involved. As far as her boss, etc. were concerned, nothing had ever been wrong. If I remember correctly, she said something along the lines of they would have discovered it when it came time to reconcile the books. The bank account would have been $2000 short, and it would have taken lots of time to figure out where the problem was, but eventually they would have discovered it.
So yeah, I think it would be very difficult to get away with it, unless cash was involved, but it would create lots of headaches and late nights for the finance department as they tried to figure out why they were $25,000 short. Eventually they would tie it to a specific transaction, and pursue things from there.
Yeah, car dealerships deal with mistakes and scams all the time, they’re going to know the basic ins and outs of getting you to pay. I find it likely that the contract already contains something that will solve the issue if a check bounces, even if it’s one of those that take a long time to bounce (like the real-looking cashier’s checks that get used in various scams). Most likely, they can start charging you interest on the unpaid amount if you decide to push it. In the case of a cashier’s check it’s really easy for them to prove what happened, since you’ll have to cancel the cashier’s check at your bank, which makes blatant fraud obvious. If it was cash it’s harder to prove, but I’d bet money that any dealer willing to take a sack with $25k in it has cash handling procedures that would cover them - I’d certainly have a camera, multiple witnesses, and a paper receipt specifically for the cash distinct from the bill of sale.
The salesman would be worried not because he’d be personally responsible for the money (generally the dealership is) but because he would be in trouble for it. Definitely chewed out, probably a formal written warning and commission check delayed until the money comes in, and possibly just fired. In all of the US, the answer to ‘Is it a firing offense’ is ‘Yes, if they want it to be’ - ‘failed to collect the money for the sale’ is not anything that you’re prohibited from firing a person for’, though the salesman might be able to collect unemployment.
Meant to add a personal anecdote - I once sold a non-working car to a mechanic. The car needed a new engine which was more than the car’s blue book value, but the fact that it had a working stereo, AC, etc. made it worthwhile to him to pay $500 for it since he was going to get a junked engine and do the labor himself. I signed over the title at the time, and didn’t think much of it. A year later, coincidentally the year I ditched my land line, I got a note on the door. He had not bothered to title the car since he wasn’t going to drive it without an engine, but when he completed the work he gave the paperwork to his son, and his son had lost it all. In the actual case, he paid me the cost for doing a replacement title transfer to him and I sorted it out. But if I had been dishonest, the car’s title was still in my name, he had lost the bill of sale, and the specific cash never hit a bank (I used the cash to pay for some yard work so there was no $500 deposit to track), so I could have gone to the cops and claimed that the car was stolen and gotten it back with a shiny new engine. I don’t think that he would have had any legal recourse since all of the paper said that it was mine (in practice, he knew my address so I suspect I’d wake up to find the car sabotaged).
Judging by the number of people in this thread that appear to be confused as to how cashier’s checks leave a papertrail, or what the discovery process is in a civil suit, it’s also a possibility that he had mistakenly thought that he would have been personally liable for the missing funds as well.