by Rene Kelly

Created on: April 18, 2008

If You Didn't Enter the Lottery, Don't Cash the Check

You come home from work one day and find an unexpected envelope in your mail box. Your curiosity peaked, you open the envelope. It contains something surprising. It's a letter stating that you've won the Irish International Lottery or the Swedish Sweepstakes or something of that nature. Funny; you don't remember entering that. But the envelope also contains a check, so you're definitely interested.

As you continue reading the letter, you find that you have to pay taxes before you can claim the prize. The check is a portion of the winnings to help pay the taxes so that you can have the rest of the money. Oh, yeah. There is a little extra to get you started. You're to cash the check and send the amount stated in the letter to an address also stated in the letter. The funds are to be sent by money order, MoneyGram, or some other cash equivalent. Once that is received, you'll get the rest of your prize.

You take the check to your bank to cash it so that you can claim your prize. Your bank is not as trusting as you are, but they do cash it because it is a real bank account. Then the fun begins.

Let me tell you what happens from the point of view of the supposed maker on the check. You see, that's where I come in. I manage the department that handles the bank accounts for my company, and I see this more often that I care to think about. By the way, we didn't issue that check; it's counterfeit - a fake.

The banks offer many fraud prevention services to large companies like ours. For example, we use a service whereby we send the bank a daily list of the checks that we issued. If anything not on that list is presented for payment, the bank notifies us and we have the opportunity to return the check. When your check hits our account, not only do we return it, but we notify the bank that it's an attempted fraud.

When the first couple of checks show up, we're amused by how nave people can be. But if it continues, and sometimes they go on for two or three months before moving to a different account, it gets to be a royal pain. My staff are spending more and more time dealing with this. So we become less and less amused. I have even gone so far as to file a complaint with the Postal Inspector. I don't know if you are aware of it, but mail fraud is a serious offense.

So what does this do to your account?

First this check will be deducted from your account because we will instruct our bank to return it as fraud. And your bank

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