Fake Check Scams

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome back to Fraud Fridays! Today, we are discussing Fake Check Scams. The fake check scam arises from many different situations (for instance, you applied for a job, or you are selling something on a place like Craigslist, or someone wants to purchase goods or services from your business, or you were offered a job as a mystery shopper, you were asked to wrap your car with an advertisement, or you received a check in the mail for no reason), but the bottom line is always something like this:

The scammer sends you a very real looking, but fake, check. Sometimes they'll call it a "cashier's check", a "certified check", or a "verified check".

You deposit the check into your account, and within a couple of days your financial institution makes some or all of the funds available to you. This makes you think that the check is real, and the funds have cleared. However, the money appearing in your account is not the same as the check actually clearing. The financial institution generally must make the funds available to you before they have cleared the check.

For various and often complicated reasons, depending on the specific story line of the scam, the scammer will ask you to send someone some of the money, using services like MoneyGram, Western Union, and Walmart-2-Walmart. Sometimes the scammer will ask for you to purchase gift cards (i.e., iTunes, Amazon, Steam, etc.) and give them the codes to redeem the gift cards. Some scammers may also give you instructions on how to buy and send them bitcoins.

Within a couple of weeks, though it can take as long as a month, your institution will realize that the check you deposited was fake and will remove the funds that you deposited into your account and charge you a bounced check fee. If you withdrew any of the money from the fake check, that money will be gone, and you will owe that money to your financial institution. Some posters have even had their accounts closed and have been blocked from having another account for 5 years using ChexSystems.

Come back next Friday for another dose of knowledge!