Need an answer to a burning question. I have to send a friend of mine a check for a few hundred dollars. Has to be a check. Couldn’t I scan it and send it to him digitally, he prints it out and goes to his bank to deposit it. Is this unheard of?
Especially since he’s not going to cash it, but deposit it, and has the funds in his account to cover it. I recall hearing or reading once that checks were really just pieces of paper and not really official and that one could print a check or write one on anything.
There’s no way you can legally e-mail a check. It would be mail fraud and forgery. Look at your check book, the paper has watermarks and a bunch of other stuff to stop you doing this. How are you going to print the back of the check? And do you think the bank is going to accept a check which doesn’t have your original signauture?
If you need to send him money, then check, money order, or a wire service (paypal, Western Union etc) will do the trick.
It’s just a check? What’s the worst if it gets lost? Put a stop payment on it if it goes astray. It is very easy to track a check through your bank now.
There was a recent thread about printing checks. Yes, you can pretty much print a check on anything but it has to be signed by the account holder and a copy will not do.
“There was a recent thread about printing checks. Yes, you can pretty much print a check on anything but it has to be signed by the account holder and a copy will not do”.
That’s my surmise. A check can be printed on anything, doesn’t have to be the fancy watermarked stuff. Byt I imagine you are corerct about there being an original signature.
A check has to have the following to be negotiable:
a date
an amount
“pay to the order of” information
signature of person writing the check (signature can be in the form of a PIN for electronic checks).
That’s it, no more is legally necessary. The nice preprinted checks that you get from your bank or check printer certainly help speed the clearing process and reduce errors but aren’t mandatory. In my years in banking I have seen a “check” written on a shirt and one written on a specimen cup (both written as alimony payments, BTW). There was a celebrated case of a check being written on a cow, but that was really a publicity stunt that the bank agreed to in advance. Copies of checks will work as well, so long as the signature is original. They’ll just gum up the bank’s MICR reading equipment and end up being handled manually.
As to the OP, the signature is going to be your sticking point. I can think of no way to maintain an original signature on a traditional check transmitted electronically.
I don’t know – my Quicken/BankOne online bill pay still pays some backwards companies using a laser draft check. There’s no signature at all. Instead it says:
The routing number and account number are mine, and for all intents and purposes it’s a check that I wrote out of my own checkbook.
What about the checks I get for my stock dividends, or just about anything from a corporation? There’s not an actual signature on the check, just an electronic reproduction. That’s basically a copy.
I think the OP could get away with it, but I would just ask the recipient to call the bank and ask beforehand.
Those checks you get from corporations are still essentially “original documents” because the company must account for issuing them - it can’t just print them off willy nilly and get away with it. There have been auditing procedures in place for years to cover use of mechanical and electronic facsimile equipment like the following:
Facsimile signatures for companies are accepted but the company first signs an agreement with the bank authorizing the use of facsimile signatures (and generally submits a sample of the signature) prior to issuing any checks. Balthisar - I’d be willing to bet that you, somewhere in your online banking agreement, authorized your bank to issue unsigned drafts on your behalf. Check out the small print, it’s in there somewhere. In a nutshell, exceptions are made to the original signature requirements, but they must be agreed to in writing prior to issuing checks. That’s the rub for bardos.
