The other day, a customer called me at the Bank from his winter home in Arizona. The gentleman was very upset and he said needed our help.
He had recently received a phone call telling him he had won a large cash prize. I asked him if he remembered entering the contest he had supposedly won. “I enter so many,” he told me. “It’s hard to keep track.”
He said the caller made it sound like they knew him. And – since he was “a big winner” – they said they’d be sending him a check. All he had to do was cash it and then wire them back the $4000 that wasn’t part of his winnings.
Now that should have rung alarm bells. And it did! The gentleman told me he suspected that something was wrong. But when the large prize check arrived just as the caller promised, he decided “to give it a shot anyway.”
He deposited their check into his Arizona bank account, then withdrew $4000 as directed and wired it to the number he had been given.
It was right after sending the wire that he started getting cold feet. In fact, the poor man started to panic. He was afraid he had been taken. He was right. He had been.
He called back to Canton to see if his bank accounts here were in danger. He asked me what would happen with the “prize check” he had deposited into his Arizona account and the $4000 he had wired.
I was able to assure him that his accounts in Canton were safe. Unfortunately, that was about all the good news I could give him. I explained that he was the victim of a classic scam and urged him to call his Arizona bank and the local police immediately, in case there was any possible way of getting his money back.
In reality, there was very little hope of that happening. That “prize check” was going to bounce and his $4000 was almost surely gone forever.
He was sorry he hadn’t listened to himself, sorry he ever got involved in this mess. He thanked me for helping him and I told him I wished I could do more. “Tell other people not to fall for this,” he said. I promised him I would.
A few days later, a person came into the Bank with one of those “prize checks.” Unlike the gentleman in Arizona, this person was pretty sure it was some sort of scam. They said: “I know this check might not be real, but – if it goes bad – I figured you would handle it.”
“You mean you’re here asking a bank to knowingly cash a bad check for you?!,” I asked, amazed.
They were! They figured it would be our loss when the check came back unpayable.
I told them that passing bad checks is 100% illegal and a serious crime. The police could be called. And any bank that cashed such a check would be required by law to recover the money from the check-casher’s account. If the check-casher didn’t have enough in their account to cover the check, they could be sued and liens could possibly be placed against any property they owned.
As a courtesy, I offered to shred the bad check right there for them. They refused and huffed out the door. What a shame! They realized someone had tried to scam them with a bad check and their first instinct was to use that as an opportunity to try to scam somebody else. Not good karma, that!
Nick Maffeo is the President & CEO of Canton Co-operative Bank in Canton. “Smart About Money” is a regular column he writes for the Canton Citizen. Have a financial question you’d like to ask? Email to info@cantoncoopbank.com.