I literally recounted my own personal experience with my own bank doing this for a legitimate check I wrote. If you thought that was my attempt to criticize my bank, you are wrong. The check I wrote was for $160. I don’t care. I’m glad my bank is this diligent. Many banks check this shit now. Wells Fargo could, but they choose not to because they are greedy pigs.
Again, my bank does this now, and it doesn’t seem to be bankrupting them.
I don’t use them much, either. I have one bimonthly expense where the recipient prefers a paper check. That’s what the check was that my bank flagged. This is not burdensome on the bank. This is literally what they’re supposed to do. The whole point of a bank is to secure your money better than your mattress can. If they don’t take reasonable precautions, then they aren’t doing their job.
As an elderly individual I trust banks exactly as much as I trust any republican organization. Reading the history of the Wells Fargo institution is disgusting to say the least,
i’m not convinced that’s true. some months ago my wife and i mailed a check to an agency which was the down payment on an extended vacation in 2025. the check did not clear for three months. after one month the agency called to ask if there were any irregularities in our financial arrangements because their bank had submitted the check to our bank . . . a week passes, that’s when the agency called us. i called my bank and talked to some “executive” who gave me tale of minor clerical issues which would be straightened out soon. around ten days later the check clears and everything is fine. a day or two later an acquaintance who once represented me on a legal issue asked if i wanted lunch on the day following. interesting meeting-- tl;dr–my check got swept up as part of a federal criminal investigation ongoing from the atlanta and dallas federal reserve districts. specifically related to traffic between gulf coast states and africa.
all of which is to go the long way 'round to say that a better response would have been to say–
“Checks don’t usually trigger SARs like cash because checks are traceable.”
i hear and agree with everything you’re saying – but i don’t think this part should be legal either.
all anybody has to do is steal money on the day you get your statement. one month later you get your statement and see that it was stolen, and now you have no recourse.
I feel totally spoiled. We bank with a local credit union, they know our spending pattern (or their computer does, anyway) and we get a call for activity outside the norm. We have had accounts hacked a few times, but they caught it before we did and we never had any trouble recouping the loss. These “too big to fail” banks are also too big to trust. Local is generally better.
the last time there was actual fraud on my account, it was because I just happened to check my statement and found it.
one call and ten minutes later, I had the transaction reversed, card canceled, and a new one overnighted to me.
I’ve been texted by my credit union’s security group because their automated system pulled a “that transaction looks sketchy” and forced me to confirm that yes, I really was trying that transaction before they let it through.
I’ve been with my credit union for over 30 years, and while sometimes I’ve not been all that good of a customer, they’ve been good to me overall.
Similar thing happened to me when I handed my IRS check personally to the Post Office, and it was stolen immediately. My statement just showed it as cashed, so I was done with it. Not until the IRS sent me a letter 3 months later asking when I was planning on paying my taxes, did I have any inkling it was stolen.
I reported it to PNC Bank (my bank) and they quickly found that it had been cashed at a Chase bank, who did not notice that the payee was not US TREASURY.
And still, it took 9 months, and some prodding by the CFPB (Consumer Finance Protection Board), and then the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) before they would reimburse me.
If I hadn’t gotten tired of the broken promises and deadlines, and Googled my butt off, I might still be waiting.
Did someone who works at the bank work with the check washer? Seriously, this is an old old scam. I don’t my bank cashing a sum that large with out notifying me. Well - it would bounce for that amount, but still.
I don’t have access to the exact agreement in this case, but usually they say something like you must report the problem within 30 days following the date of the statement where the problem first appears. For example, here’s an example Wells Fargo agreement I just found (this may not be the exact one that applied to the person in the story):
On page 29, the section about “Your responsibility to review account statements and notices and notify us of errors” says “You are obligated to: […] • Notify us within 30 days after we have made your account statement available to you of any unauthorized transaction on your account.”
In other words, it is not 30 days from the fraudulent transaction like you were are thinking, so the timing isn’t as bad as you were suggesting. But you still need to look at your statement as soon as you get it so you can notice and report problems within the 30 day range from the statment date.
The point that checks are traceable should make this whole issue moot, especially in light of the draconian KYC laws. I.e. KYC should mean that the bank knows exactly who is receiving your money, even fraudulently, and should have no problem clawing it back and depositing it in your account, even if it means putting a negative balance on the fraudster.
Unfortunately the banks follow KYC laws (yes, I know they didn’t make the law, they just follow it) when it protects them, and claim ignorance when they don’t want to use KYC in reverse, i.e. to protect the consumer who was defrauded because the bank didn’t follow KYC laws stringently enough to prevent the fraud.
They should contact their congressional office for assistance. The congressional office can submit a congressional inquiry to the bank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
I have a friend who something similar happened to but the bank was BOA. In the end BOA had to credit his account the $48,000 that had been fraudulently taken from his account.
The rest of the western world is watching all this meshugas with paper checks, and wondering why y’all don’t rise up with pitchforks and demand a banking system which has entered the 21st century (24 years later than everyone else).
The last time I saw a paper check in person, it was a government repayment, it was a glitch that it was done that way and not by direct deposit, and the recipient couldn’t find anywhere who would accept it and deposit it into their account. (They eventually found a way, but their own bank wouldn’t take it.)
Gov.uk still pays out tax refunds and so on as cheques. I last received one during Covid, when all the banks were closed. I thought, how am I supposed to pay it in? Fortunately, the banks had introduced a feature in their app which let you pay a cheque in by taking a photo of it with your smartphone.
Going by the way you spelled cheques, I’m going to guess you aren’t in the US. Paper checks are still somewhat common here. Not as common as they used to be, of course, but common enough that most banks still offer them, and most places still accept them as payment. We still have a lot of people who do not trust digital transactions.
Yes! I set mine at 300, so I get a text whenever a withdrawal above that is “pending,” then again when it’s finalized.
At that low number, I do get a fair share of alerts about my own withdrawals, but that’s okay. Those are somehow reassuring too, like, Good, this thing is working right.
and BEYOND for local credit unions.
