Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/24/what-do-you-do-when-walgreens-sends-a-check-to-your-cat-heres-what-bank-told-a-tiktoker-video.html
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I’m somewhat disappointed that they didn’t ask for a paw print
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Same procedure as for a minor child. Or someone for whom you are representing with their consent or guardianship/power of attorney or similar. /IANAL
Course the bank can choose to question you. But just deposit the check. I sign my name on my wife’s payroll checks every time. She could as easily do same for mine if I got checks.
Heck it’s been demonstrated decades ago you can nearly always get away with depositing a check made out to anyone, and endorsed “Mickey Mouse” or even “Do not accept”
Banks seldom ever look at signatures unless maybe you’re in front of a human teller.
Mostly it’s up to the person who wrote the check to challenge after it clears.
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Two threads today with “Gandalf” in them. Odd Stuff (Part 5) - #533 by FSogol
Same answer as before, “thou shall not pass” bad checks.
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The majority of checks that I have deposited in the last year using a phone app are accepted without any endorsement on the back at all.
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… It’s even more entertaining when the ‘check’ is not a check, but an advertisment that looks juuuuuuust enough like a check to fool everything but the MICR readers in the check processing centers. (that happened back in the mid 90’s, IIRC- I can’t find the web site it came from anymore, but I know that it did happen and that the FTC changed around some of the rules about making ads that looks like legit checks at the time.)
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Great, we’ve been telling Agatha for years that no one will pay us to stay home and pet her hide and now this? She’ll be both expecting checks and for her humans to take care of depositing them for her.
Assuming she lets me up long enough to leave the house, of course.
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I once applied for a Visa credit card and the helpful form asked if there was anyone else in the household that I’d like a card for, so I got one in my cat’s name, giving him a last name that was a mix of mine and my roommate’s. No problem. I would use the card sometimes and be amused by the types of junk mail he got later.
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Wouldn’t be the same as endorsing a check by someone who couldn’t write? The cat would just make some sort of mark and it would be noted next to it that it was the cat’s mark.
Again IANAL, but I expect there’s some speciesist legal qualification that implies a cat isn’t a legal person. Thus its mark has no legal validity.
I know. Try explaining that to the CAT.
I bet he’ll give it a mark that’s quite memorable. Mine would, for sure.
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At least the cat wasn’t embezzling the money
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In fact, the law considers pets to be property. I’m not sure what the proper legal procedure for cashing a check like this is, but I would think it’s arguably an invalid check. What you should really do if you find yourself in this situation is contact the issuer of the check, politely call them idiots, and have them reissue the check to you, an actual person.
They other thing you could do, since this is a TikTok account in the cat’s name, is file a DBA (Doing Business As) for yourself with the cat’s name as the business name. This creates a sole proprietorship business with your cat’s name as the business name, which would allow you to legally cash a check made out to your cat.
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When some of these regulations/laws were written wayyyy back when… did they ever think this would apply to a house cat, eh?
“Good sir, I cannot fathom whereby one would engage with a CAT in a financial transaction… that would be silly, now go away with your nonsense, I’ve got some mercury to inject in my buttocks.”
Slacker bunny edition!
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My bank recently started cracking down on that, which has caused me some inconvenience. The policy is that they won’t let me deposit checks that aren’t made out to the account holder. Fine, except that people sometimes write me checks made out to an extremely common shortening of my first name, and they’re no longer accepting those. Needs to be my full legal name now.
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Well if they’re property perhaps there is some case law dating back to the days of legal slavery. How would an owner cash a check made out to on of the owner’s slaves?
I doubt that ever happened.
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That’s not how slavery works.
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