3 ms·
I never use cheques, but had a strange cheque related situation a few years ago. For some reason an empty bank account that I never use had gone £100 overdrawn,
by johtso 3y ago
I never use cheques, but had a strange cheque related situation a few years ago. For some reason an empty bank account that I never use had gone £100 overdrawn, supposedly due to a cheque that had been cached, and was racking up fees.
After hours of phone calls, I learnt that bank account numbers are recycled (!) after accounts are closed.. so the previous owner of my account number had tried to cache a cheque using a legitimate chequebook that they still owned.
Still amazes me that the system could be so insecure!
- manwe150 3y agoMy understanding is that the other individual has committed several felony crimes to write that check (various forms of banking fraud and theft), and given their signature to it as well, as evidence of both intent and proof of their identity. So it seems to me about as insecure as saying "I can't believe the sidewalks here are so insecure near roads, that a car could just drive down onto them and hit people." The idea is not to make it hard to move money around, but to instead make the punishment very high for trying to cheat the system.
- skybrian 3y agoSometimes relying on deterrence is necessary, but it's surprising to do it when there are seemingly easier ways - like not reusing account numbers.
- cperciva 3y agoGiven the stated currency, I suspect the bank account in question is in the UK, so the criminal law wouldn't be entirely identical. But in any case, it wasn't necessarily a crime -- someone (especially if elderly or impaired) might have accidentally used the wrong chequebook. It's only a crime to write a cheque on someone else's account if you do it deliberately. To me, the biggest issue here is simply "banks should not recycle account numbers".
- pests 3y agoI think this would happen more often with people with many accounts and many checkbooks accidently using the wrong book after closing an account, by accident.
- madaxe_again 3y agoI had precisely this, 25 years ago - I came back from a few months abroad to find a pile of letters from my new bank, NatWest, and nearly £1,000 of fees from them for a cheque that I hadn’t written that had bounced, as I had left the account empty, having just opened it. As I was a broke student with few options, I ended up having to default on it, which did wonders for my credit rating for a good long while.
- arp242 3y ago> due to a cheque that had been cached Cache invalidation is hard.
- conductr 3y agoThat’s wild. Several years ago I closed an account. Then 8 months later I got a negative balance statement. It was a NSF because a recurring ACH subscription renewed and the vendor ACH’d my account. My bank told me they did close the account when I requested but ACH attempts will reopen the account even months later. Even crazier, the merchant initiating the ACH had been refusing to cancel my subscription and my bank recommended just closing the account as the fix for that at the time. Partially because I wasn’t using it actively, I think there were other ways this just happened to be the simplest. But it didn’t work because of said reopening of account. Also, the merchant got $0 as it was NSF. But bank charged a couple $35 fees IIRC causing the negative balance. They really didn’t want to waive them and I ended up talking to like 3 layers of management to get it resolved. I was just like, “of course it was NSF how/why would I leave a balance in a closed account? Why don’t you reject the ACH some other way? Your business logic is fucked up”
- Symbiote 3y agoThat's crazy. Account numbers are 8 digits, and large banks have many sort codes, historically one per branch. Why would they need to reuse a number?
- quickthrower2 3y agoCheque was cashed, but the account number was indeed cached.