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It turns out that a signature on a bank check means nothing. Neither does the payer name on the check. Not the amount in cursive. Nor does the check paper. The
by skookumchuck 9y ago
It turns out that a signature on a bank check means nothing. Neither does the payer name on the check. Not the amount in cursive. Nor does the check paper.
The only things that are checked are the digits of the amount, and the account number.
The rest of the check can be complete garbage, and the check will go through and the bank will pay it. Then the banks will blame you, the account holder.
I learned this the hard way.
- matte_black 9y agoWhat happened next? Don’t want to try it.
- skookumchuck 9y agoI wouldn't accept their evasions and eventually they gave up and credited me.
- proofOfDeposit 9y agoI just want to take a moment, and tell you that you're wrong about what happens and what matters when a check is deposited (or cashed) and then cleared by the issuing account. The courtesy amount is the digits. The legal amount is the written expression for dollars. The legal amount matters, and had you taken your bank to court (if you didn't sign your legal rights over to arbitration), the legal amount prevails. There are rooms full of people working minimum wage night jobs, to verify checks that have values in conflict with each other, associated documents, or are generally illegible. Something like 90% of checks are verified by OCR, and deposited for an amount often within a margin of $2.50 per deposit. The remaining ten percent are processed by hand, balancing deposit to written amount, usually within the $2.50 same margin. This represents hours of checking transaction amounts for tens of thousands of transactions, as a fraction of the automated processing. The $2.50 is usually reviewed by managers in an end-of-day report. For maybe a quarter of a million documents processed in one evening by a room full of around fifty people running OCR equipment (made by IBM and Unisys), and performing manual image review and physical document inspection, maybe 200 are kicked out by the machinery and software to be deciphered by hand. Sometimes people get lazy, and are on the verge of quitting anyway because night jobs suck, and if you argued until you got your way, you were probably dealing with such a situation.
- gruez 9y ago>Then the banks will blame you, the account holder. even in cases of fraud?
- skookumchuck 9y agoYes. They said I'm obliged to audit the checks myself each month.
- SilasX 9y agoYikes! Wake up call!
- whoopdedo 9y agoI had a bank tell me there was nothing they could do because I didn't notify them of a fraudulent transaction on my account within 90 days. I didn't need 90 days to find a new bank. (A credit union, in fact.)
- supertrope 9y agoThe time limit is 60 days. Obviously the sooner you report the better. Liability loss limit rises to $500 after just two days!
- whitepoplar 9y agoIn what country do you live?
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoA less oddly prescriptivist one than yours, apparently.
- rypskar 9y agoIs there more than one country that still uses checks?
- sleet 9y agoIt amazes me that cheques are still used. I'm 36 and I've never issued a cheque, I think I was issued a cheque book with my first account but never used it.
- crazygringo 9y agoOver the past 6 years, literally the only thing I've used my checkbook for was security deposit and first month's rent. But my last two apartments required cashier's checks for both... so honestly, I don't expect to write another check my whole life.
- spacehome 9y agoLandlords only want cashier's checks if they don't trust you. If they don't trust you, they're less likely to rent to you. So requiring cashier's checks is uncommon, barring some extenuating circumstance like you've previously written a bad check or been late.
- gregpilling 9y agoAs a landlord, I always request cash or cashiers check for move in money. I don't want you living there for 3 months for free while I fight your bad check through the court system to get you evicted. It may sound shocking, but some people will do this. Source: me, landlord since 2001.
- dperfect 9y ago> The only things that are checked are the digits of the amount, and the account number. Well, the payee is also usually verified to match the destination account, and a few other elements are technically required for it to be a legal financial instrument (even if banks don't spend the time to check them every time). Legally, a check could be written on the back of a napkin and still be valid - as long as it has a few required details. The thing I've come to learn about checks is that their security features are not necessarily intended to prevent fraud, but rather to legally prove fraud after it has occurred. So no, banks often will not check those things, but anyone with access to the ACH network can reach into anyone's account and move funds around if fraud is suspected (it's basically a shared database with surprisingly little security). It inherently relies on the legal system to sort things out after the fact, which is a completely different approach from what we see in modern information security (where preventing unauthorized access/behavior upfront is the primary concern).
- koolba 9y ago> It inherently relies on the legal system to sort things out after the fact, ... This is why it’s critical to have transaction alerts for all activity for your financial accounts. Otherwise you could have an ACH slip through that drains your account. You wouldn’t notice till the next time you logged in or, more likely, when you try to use your debit card and realize it’s cleaned out.
- Someone1234 9y agoOn that note, also consider your daily transfer limit. Often times banks will set these limits unnecessarily high ($10K is common). Alerts are a good way to spot the fraud, but limits cap how much they can take in the mean time. Even if you will ultimately get refunded, it could take months of a slow investigation before that occurs. I have mine set to double the most we've ever spent in a single month, and I've only had to increase it once (vehicle downpayment).
- rokhayakebe 9y agothat drains your account. This is barely dangerous imo. Inconvenient perhaps but not dangerous. The reason being your bank will refund the money. The dangerous ones are those that take tiny amounts monthly that you just won't notice.
- Merad 9y agoFor all intents your checking account is a locker full of money that’s unlocked for the taking. The check is nothing more than an archaic means of conveying your “locker number” to someone else’s bank. I highly recommend keeping your checking account balance as low as you can, and either disable overdraft protection on it or point the overdraft protection to a credit account. The other info on the check isn’t meaningless. It will (should) be examined when there’s some kind of fraud or dispute about a check payment - but it effectively does nothing to prevent fraud or theft.
- toephu2 9y agoWhere do you put your non-investment money then?
- function_seven 9y agoIn a savings or share* account. Checks can't be written against this as far as I know. * A share account is what they call it at a credit union.
- xyzzyz 9y agoYou can still use ACH to pull money from savings account, but you’d need to get the number first.
- function_seven 9y agoThat figures. Well at least the number isn’t floating around out there. But unfortunately many CUs have just a single digit difference between accounts.
- jandrese 9y agoYeah, but given a checking account number you can often guess an associated saving account number, especially if you're familiar with the bank.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
- Rapzid 9y agoIIRC, back when I worked at Wells Fargo, they further audited a certain(7?) percent of the checks being processed.
- jdavis703 9y agoThat's not always true. I bought a car in 2012 and paid by check. Unfortunately I tranposed the cents amount for 89 and 98 in the two number fields. I got a call a few days later saying the check didn't clear because of the mismatch and that I needed to come back ASAP and write a new check with the proper amount in both fields.
- walrus01 9y agoFun fact. You can theoretically write a USA legal bank check on the back side of a napkin and it will be honored. As you point out, it just needs the correct bank routing number and account number.
- yodon 9y agoMost banks now have clauses allowing them to reject non-standard checks. Too many people writing “pay to the order of” on coconuts and pigs and other non-machine-readable items
- walrus01 9y agoI'd like to see a method to get MICR ink onto the side of a coconut.
- Apocryphon 9y agoWhere are these people, in Ripley's Believe It or Not?
- jandrese 9y agoProbably people who believe that the payment they are making is unjust. Former scum landlord is charging you to repaint the walls because you "ruined them" when they were in fact pristine when you left, just because he doesn't want to foot the bill for finally getting rid of that 70s era mustard yellow color. You could fight it, but he has a lot more time for small claims court than you do, and you now live halfway across the country.
- all_blue_chucks 9y agoAs long as it's not fraudulent, it's all legal. But will a bank take it? That's an entirely different question.
- r00fus 9y agoThen why is MICR positioning such a pain? (I work with software that automates the check printing process) Checks have many safeguards against fraud. "Catch me if you can" exploits have protection.
- secabeen 9y agoThat has not been my experience. I've had multiple checks rejects for mis-matches between the written out line, and the numeric amount. I've also had checks deducted based on the written amount and the numeric amount ignored. In the old days, they would print a computer-readable version of the amount on the bottom of the check, right-justified with the account number. Once that was there, most banks just processed that, and ignored the rest of the check.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoThis is untrue. The signature and the amount in cursive do matter, but not in the way most people think, they matter only after the fact. If a check is unsigned and someone cashes it then you can usually get that money back in small claims court, though not always. Or if the signature doesn't match on a check you can use that to convince your bank that the check is fraudulent. Also, if the amount that the check was cashed for differs from the amount written in cursive, again you have avenues of redress there including small claims court. As you say, none of this will prevent basically any amount of money from being withdrawn from your account however. But you do absolutely have routes available to you to get your money back. If your bank blamed you instead and didn't let you know what options you had then you had a shitty bank that rolled you, you should get a new bank (or a credit union).
- drfuchs 9y agoBack in the day, I had a case of the opposite problem: my check to the phone company got cashed for $89.89 rather than the $89.98 that was due, even though I had written both the digits and the spelled-out version of the number indisputably correctly. So PacBell decided to slap me with a $35 fee for not paying my balance off on time. The cancelled check that I had in hand clearly showed that the mistake wasn’t mine, and it also had been imprinted with the wrong amount at some processing step along the way. Needless to say both the bank and PacBell declined to take any responsibility, and it took a lot of time on the phone before getting a sympathetic rep who could reverse the fee “for goodwill“. Surely this must not be a unique case; what’s supposed to happen in this sort of situation?
- ceejayoz 9y ago> The only things that are checked are the digits of the amount, and the account number. YMMV. Simple won't let me deposit a check made out to "Me and Wife" in my personal account - I can only deposit it in our joint. They'll permit me to deposit "Me OR Wife".
- imroot 9y agoI had a really negative issue with Simple: a garnishment (wasn't my garnishment -- there's someone with my same first and last name with the same birth date who has a different middle name) that was incorrectly applied to my account. When I presented Simple (and their controlling bank) notification from the garnishing agency that they had garnished the wrong account (and deposited the check from the garnishing state's treasury back into my account), Simple's response was...to garnish my account. Suffice to say, I went back to my neighborhood bank. To Simple's credit: Their customer support was beyond fantastic -- they were at the mercy of their controlling bank...who was receiving the garnishment request. When Simple switched banks last year, I received a check in the mail for $3 and change for the amount that I had left in my account after moving my direct deposits and such over. Just...a massive headache.
- astura 9y agoYeah, I'm really baffled as to why people write checks this way, I've schooled a few people on this - always write Person 1 OR Person 2, that way either of them can handle it the way that make most sense for them. Whenever I pointed out the issue with writing "and," I always get "oh, I didn't know that." To me that's obvious?
- rhino369 9y agoThey are supposed to but only if your wife endorsed it too.
- ceejayoz 9y agoI suggested that approach, as well as having her file a support request authorizing it through her own Simple account. Apparently their parent bank's policies prevent both. This was before they had the joint offering, so we had to request a new check. Now we just put stuff in the joint.
- repiret 9y agoJust last November I miswrote a check where the digits and written amount differed, and it was processed for the written amount, which has traditionally been the controlling value.
- skookumchuck 9y agoI was taught to write the number as $400 23/100 One day about 3 years ago, all such checks started coming through as $4.00, and I wound up with late fees and such. Although the bank denied it, it was pretty obvious they'd just changed their OCR software. I now write the checks as $400.23
- khedoros1 9y agoYou weren't taught to write it as "Four-hundred and 23/100", and then "$400.23" in the little box?
- skookumchuck 9y agoI meant $400 23/100 in the little box on the right.
- leephillips 9y agoNever in my life seen a check written this way.
- jandrese 9y agoYou are one of those people that makes some OCR software writer's job a nightmare.
- skookumchuck 9y agoI was taught that long before anyone even thought of OCR :-)
- sergers 9y agoI had rented out my basement suite. My renter's for 1.5 years wrote me cheques with payee of wrong first name, and typo in last name. No issues depositing any
- jimnotgym 9y agoI work for a UK business and we have had a number of queries from our bank because of an unrecognised signature on a cheque written from our account. So some banks in some places di check the signature
- patmcc 9y ago>>The only things that are checked are the digits of the amount, and the account number. Ha! Not even that. In the cheque clearing process, about the only thing that ever gets checked (even by automated processes) is the MICR line (account/transit and institution number). Everything else (EVERYTHING ELSE) is just assumed to match whatever the person entered at the ATM/image capture app/teller window. The bank considers it your problem, as the cheque writer, to catch any issues on your next statement, and then they'll review the image of the cheque (in many jurisdictions now, the physical cheque is destroyed pretty early in the process). You should really never ever give a cheque to someone you don't trust. It's pretty silly, but that's the reality. Although, fun fact, it's the cursive amount that is the 'official' one if there's a mismatch between that and the digits, since it's much more difficult to subtly adjust that. Source: work for an institution that processes literally millions of cheques (I'm not in that area, but yeah).
- RHSeeger 9y agoCame here to say this. The "spelled out" amount takes priority if there's a conflict in the two values. Also worth noting, it doesn't need to be in cursive. I spent all my life struggling with writing in cursive on checks (because it's pretty much the only place I ever do it). One day, someone told me I could print it (it just never occurred to me that this was acceptable) and I've been much happier ever since (during the, you know, 10 times a year I actually write checks).
- jandrese 9y agoI'm down to 4 checks per year now. City and County taxes, twice per year. For some reason the local government still uses a credit card processor that adds 3% on top of whatever you pay, and when you're talking about property tax that's painful. The stamp is much cheaper. I've been printing the amount for years now, as my cursive was never terribly legible to begin with and has decayed from lack of use. The whole point of that field is to make it so someone can't just add some zeros to the end of the value. Just write the value out and draw a line through the rest of the field.
- 9y ago
- teddyh 9y agoReally? http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/unavoidable-result http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/unavoidable-result
- astura 9y agoYeah, I once wrote my landlord a check and totally forgot to sign it. The bank cashed it just fine, I was surprised. It also depends on the teller, how much of a hardass they are going to be about cashing it. I guess I don't know what the protocol is for for mobile deposit, they may or may not have manual review.
- ghaff 9y agoIt does depend. I forgot to sign a check for my car registration last year and it got returned to me.