Quote:
Originally Posted by Grease23
I've read all these posts and I'm not sure the most common tool used by the fraudsters is being clearly explained. Many have mentioned 'making sure the check has cleared,' which misses the point.
Banks are under an obligation to put deposited funds into your account so that they are available to you in a relatively short period of time. A short period of time as in a couple days or so. If you accept a totally phony cashier's check (nonexistent bank, or nonexistent account, for example) the bank WILL "clear" the check in the sense that you can check your balance and see the money there. And you can take it out. That will happen in 2 or 3 days. The check "clearing" doesn't mean it was real.
That doesn't really mean you are out of the woods. It can take 10 to 14 days or more for the fake check to work its way through the system and come to the attention of your bank as being fraudulent. Once that happens -- and believe me there will be no delay here -- your bank will take that money out of your account or out of any other account you have at the bank. The scam takes advantage of the float time; i.e., the time between the moment your bank has to put the money into your account (by law) and make it accessible to you and how long it takes for the bogus check to come back as bogus. If you've taken the money out (or some of it out) you're not off the hook and the bank will come after you aggressively for the balance or the whole amount if you took all of it. Once you understand the key to this, it is hard to blame your bank. You, after all, deposited a fake check. You chose to do business with the person who gave it to you.
So, as some have asked, are cashier's checks worthless from a safety point of view? No, not at all. But you meet at the buyer's bank and you stand with the buyer as they tell the cashier how to make the check out and which account they want to take it out of and how much it will be for. Then you hand over the keys. Do this and you're golden. Only a script writer is going to physically create a bank and populate it with phony bankers and customers to fool you. I wouldn't trust a bank employee (most of whom are paid miserable sums) to "verify" any check for you and most of them will decline to get involved in that way.
|
Do you work in banking? From your post here it doesn’t sound like you do. It sounds like these are things you have “figured out” based on your experience with banks.
These days bank are GENERALLY required by regulation J to credit funds to your account much more quickly than they used to be. This is because checks generally clear, are paid or returned by the institution they are drawn on, much more quickly than they used to be. But, there are exceptions to this requirement. With large items, such as a $75,000 cashier’s check, banks absolutely do take extra steps to make sure the item is genuine.
Regarding holding the availability of funds, banks can and do place holds on funds they have concerns about. This isn’t an exact correlation, because I imagine Keis deposited the check into an established account, but I just opened a new high yield savings account with the online bank subsidiary of a brick and mortar bank with a $500 EFT (electronic funds transfer) from my established checking account with a very large national bank. Before I made the EFT deposit the new bank did the typical electronic test deposits and withdrawals of a few cents to ensure the account was legitimate. In spite of having confirmed the legitimacy of my checking account and the fact that the EFT deposit I made was only $500 they placed a hold on the availability of the entire $500 for either seven or ten calendar days (can’t remember which) before the funds even showed up that they were in my account. The transaction showed up on their website, but it didn’t even show that it was posted to my account until the day they made the funds available. I took notice of this because I wondered if they were going to do this as a way to avoid paying the higher interest during the hold period, but I was pleased to find out they were paying interest even though the availability of the funds was being held.
So, there is not a hard and fast requirement that banks make uncollected funds available to their customers within just two or three days without exception.