There’s been some serious family drama going on in my family. Long story short, I have an aunt and uncle who have a daughter who has been disowned by the family for a year now over her stealing a car for drug money after leaving rehab prematurely. though the Aunt seemingly was the one behind this decision not my Uncle.
My Aunt is now claiming that my Uncle (her husband) wrote their daughter a $2,000 check in secret and gave it to her to pay bills, and that my Aunt only knows of this because Bank of America personally called her up on the phone to ask if the check was “legitimate” or not. My Uncle isn’t on Facebook but my Aunt and their daughter is, and my Aunt claims this is the case while their daughter is denying it happened and that my Aunt is using this to claim that nobody in my family should help out their daughter because she’s already getting secret checks in the mail to cover expenses.
So I’m basically curious, would Bank of America have contacted my Aunt over a “suspicious check being cashed” despite the fact the check would have been in my Uncle’s name and hand-writing? My Aunt made a big deal about how she knew my Uncle wrote it (and that it wasn’t a stolen check) because the hand-writing on the check matched my Uncles exactly. But how would she have known that?
I doubt the bank is employing handwriting experts on a full-time basis to routinely determine whether the handwriting on checks belongs to an account holder. Hell, in this day and age, most banks will let you cash a check via a phone app and the money will be available in your account without it ever being examined by human eyes.
For example, was this deposited to the daughter’s ongoing account, had she been a customer of the bank for years? Or was she trying to cash the cheque as in “cash please”? Is this a small town where the local bank folks knows the interesting family history, or a large impersonal city institution? Was it written on a normal cheque from the uncle’s chequebook using the next sequential cheque number?
Why would the bank call Aunty? Were they calling Uncle and she got the call? Is it a joint account? (Can she even tell them to block his cheque if it’s not a joint account?) Was it cleaning out most of his account?
I guess the real question is - what about this transaction would make it seem suspicious? My off-the-wall guess is “asking for cash”.
Maybe 15 years ago I wrote a large check to a house painter, and he took it to my bank to cash it. They did indeed call me to ask if it was legit. Wasn’t Bank of America, rather a small local chain.
Yes, most banks would prefer you take a cheque and go to your bank, deposit it in your account, and then send it through the clearinghouse system, if you are not also a customer of theirs in good standing. That way, if the cheque is bogus, it’s your bank that has to eat the loss, not them.
Banks will call if they think something is unusual, or risk is high. I used to sign checks in the multimillion dollar range occasionally (as a lawyer, not my own funds). I would get called by the bank from time to time to ask about them.
I asked the bank about it once and they said in essence they had a “points” style system that would trigger when a certain value of risk factors were present.
As I understand it (the banks won’t say, for obvious reasons) the risk factors are things like amount, the identity of the payee, whether it was is being cashed or banked to an account, whether its an account with them or another bank, whether it fitted with existing account patterns etc.
My banking experience is >10 years out of date, but I don’t think a whole lot has changed.
They don’t need “handwriting experts,” the computer system pops up an example of their signature.
Yes, there is a different treatment in depositing a check vs cashing one, particularly in the latter case with non account holders. I think we called on these every time >$1000. The only exception is that some businesses (I recall Target) would match the check number with the person’s name and ask you to confirm. Government checks could not be held even if huge.
Re: points system. There are two separate issues here: people who are committing fraud or theft, and people who have no nefarious intent but are poor money managers and may bounce checks etc. They can call in either case, the latter they can put a hold on the maximum time allowed by law, while in the former they may not process it until the issuer confirms it. Factors influencing these decisions are accounts <30 days old, multiple overdrafts, “atypical” transaction where someone with consistently <$1000 gets a $50,000 check. They can waive these in some cases - a 20 year customer is probably not giving a bad check intentionally, so the risk is low. The computer would ask for approval if they identified any of these factors, but the factors that go into it aren’t a mystery, just how they might be weighted.
I remember more than one counterfeit check which just had glaringly different fonts in different sections. They used the tactic of getting agitated and once playing the race card, all to cause discomfort in the bank employees so that they might prematurely approve it just to get out of the situation.
American banking is weird. A strange mixture of modern and old fashioned. As if they were entering data with a quill pen.
If I sent a cheque (unlikely since I have no idea where my chequebook is) to someone who then tried to cash it at a bank, they would be out of luck, since banks will not cash a cheque for a non-customer. They could take it to a shop that offers to cash cheques for a fee, but I suspect that they would not be keen on a personal cheque and if they did take it the fee would be a large percentage of the total.
That’s frequently the case in the USA now too. Sometimes a bank will make an exception for payroll checks, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to go to someone else’s bank and cash their personal check in 2021.
I have been called by a bank about a check - about 10 years ago, the bank called me about a check I wrote for child-care. Don’t know what the issue was with this particular check, but I confirmed that I had written a check for $X to Ms Y, and that was that.
I had the same experience about two years ago, except that it was the guy who redid my driveway. He took it to a branch of my bank and cashed it; and they called me to verify that I had written it.
As OP notes, it’s puzzling how it went from the Aunt getting a phone call about the check, to her seeing the check so she could confirm the handwriting. In any case, she could have found out all about it in a few days (after the money was gone, of course) by looking at it online from the bank records. She could probably even have extracted an image of it and attached it to her Facebook post, if she was that keen to make a point (note, I don’t recommend this without serious redacting of account details) and to spike the daughter’s denial.
I haven’t written a check in about 12 years, then I had my new gutters installed and the guy offered a 3% if I paid by cash/check. So I dug through some boxes and even though it had an old apartment address and I hadn’t written one in umpteen years it didn’t raise any flags at Chase.
I believe that is illegal in the US. A bank must honor a check drawn upon it although there may be a time delay if the bank needs to gather cask but I could theoretically write you a check for $500,000 to buy your house and my bank would have to give you the cash if you demand it (one of the reasons they are called demand accounts)
Well, most banks wouldn’t have $500,000 cash on hand to give you. You could order it and pick it up as early as next day. Some businesses did this routinely, most notably a check cashing place who brought a plastic envelope full of checks every day, and left with 5, sometimes 6 figures of cash.
Banks do have to honor checks (unless they have good reason to believe that the check is fraudulent), but that doesn’t mean they have to hand you cash if you show up with a check drawn from an account at that bank.
So, take a check to your bank, and the bank has to make the funds available in a certain amount of time. Take a check to the bank it’s drawn on that you don’t have an account at, and they don’t have to do anything.
If the account holder shows up and demands their money, the bank has to supply it. If some random person shows up with a document that may or may not have actually been authorized by the account holder, they do not.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency says it’s not:
There is no federal law or regulation that requires banks to cash checks for non-customers.
Most banks have policies that allow check cashing services only for account holders. If a bank agrees to cash a check for a non-customer, it may legally charge a fee.