4 ms·

This 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

This 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 As you say, none of this will prevent basically any amount of money from being withdrawn from your account however.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 ago
Back 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?