I think part of the complaint against WF is that it wasn’t convincingly altered, and yet, even that didn’t cause them to catch the fraudster.
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Yup. Last time I got a cheque it was from the Council, who had been overcharging me for some bullshit or other, and apparently they still refund you with cheques (presumably out of sheer spite). I took a photo of it with my Barclays app, and it cleared into my account in 3 days. I haven’t owned a chequebook since the late 90s. And I only used that for kiting to buy food from Marks and Spencer when I was skint the week before payday because they considered it rude to ask for a cheque guarantee card 
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Our House Reps are ESPECIALLY supposed to do this kind of work on the regular. They are our closest and most accessible elected official at the federal level.
I prefer to use cash when possible… Digital transactions are putting yet another layer of corporations between us and money we’ve earned via our labor…
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I’m away from home for a while, and redirected my post to my son’s address. A refund for car tax arrived as a cheque so I just said “send me a good photo and I’ll pay it in using the app”.
Did this, then the app asked for the rear side of the cheque as well. Passed this request to m’boy, received a photo of a blank piece of paper as a response 
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We banked with 3 separate ‘local’ banks while living in a small town outside Charlotte, changing as they were taken over by larger banks. We’ve now been with a federal credit union for almost 25 years, but lately we’ve seen signs that it too may be in the sights of something larger. 
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Wells Fargo strikes again…. It’s an absolute shame that the bank just allowed this to happen. It seems as if the bank ran into a dead end tracing their funds back to the payee and as a result gave up and absolved themselves of any responsibility. Ultimately, I see this as a bank error that they should correct. 
I switched from them to a local credit union many years ago and didn’t look back. I still begrudgingly use paper checks but also log into my on-line ledger frequently to sync my own off-line debit/credit spreadsheet.
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something tells me banks aren’t limited to thirty days to get their money back from us 
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It really shouldn’t have, though. Checks are either cashed, or deposited. If deposited, it went to an account and they can identify whose account it is, and take necessary steps to get the money back, even if the account owner transferred the funds out. And they can report it as criminal fraud, which sets off a whole chain reaction in itself.
If cashed, that will set up a whole different process. Most branches have less than $10,000 on hand, so the person cashing the check would have to notify the bank ahead of time, physically appear (and appear on camera), and present their ID (which gets scanned) to confirm that they could legitimately cash the check.
As someone mentioned earlier, it looks like either an inside job or gross negligence and incompetence. What baffles me is their refusal to return the funds. They have insurance to cover this sort of thing. They can report it as criminal fraud, and any funds recovered would go back to them.
Well, it doesn’t baffle me, because it is Wells Fargo. As far as banking is concerned, returning the money would be great PR, and get them more bang for the big than an expensive ad agency buy. But, Wells Fargo.
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Maybe I missed someone who made a similar comment above, but what kind of tips this off as being an inside job (and probably why WF won’t do anything about it) is how did the check forger know to change the amount to a value that would clear without going over what was in the account?
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Maybe not at the branch level where there might be nepotism and or collusion going on, but at the regional and National level they should be. A well run bank has both fraud and internal audit departments to investigate exactly this sort of occurrence, and these investigators come down like the hammer of god on any fraud they uncover, either internal or external.
As with many services, a bank is only as good as its reputation, so an incident like this should have been immediately resolved. Even if the customer never learns what actually happened, their money should have been returned to them.
That Wells Fargo decided not to do the right thing is just further testament to the saying “too big to fail means too big to exist.”
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You may already know this, but chances are the bank wanted to see the account number and either a signature or “Deposit”. That’s how my credit union works for online deposits.
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My last check book was from midland bank…
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Make no mistake about money vanishing from account holders. This is an inside job by key employees who have authority to move money electronically without being detected. I’m surprised these banks don’t have frequent audits internally & externally. This missing money was under Wells Fargo’s watch & it is secured by the FDIC for up to $100,000. Take responsibility & ownership of the issue by doing right by the customer.
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Exactly. There are probably two people involved – whoever intercepted the check (mailroom at Verizon, postal carrier) and someone at a branch or call room who could check the balance.
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THIS. The US was finally dragged, kicking and screaming the entire time, into offering, then preferring, use of chip and pin cards when the rest of the world was like “what’s all the fuss about?”
I think it was probably something along the lines of the payment processors finally going “hey, we are getting WAAAAY too much fraud from card skimmers, we should probably fix that” or some likely BS. I don’t know the actual reason, I’m just glad that we are finally getting up to the modern era for financial payments.
(I still use checks, maybe once a year? I finally had to order some checks that had my current address on them after being in this place for ten years… )
Heh. My mom was the queen of kiting checks, until someone put one in wrong and caused a cascade of bounced checks. She was pissed. I’m also pretty sure that in the US, that’s one reason why the banks are trying to move away from paper checks, because people kite them all the time.
It’s a time honored tradition for people who are living paycheck to paycheck- write the check for groceries on the Wednesday before payday, and by the time the check hits the account, payday has come and gone. Not anymore, though- most places will scan the check and turn it into an EFT transaction, which hits straight away.
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It is Wells Fargo, after all.
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See also: the metric system, single-payer universal health care, gun restrictions.
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