Bank Robs House By Mistake, Refuses To Pay Up

from the because-we-can dept

Imagine returning home from vacation and finding your home cleaned out. The thieves grabbed all the furniture, all the gadgets, all the kitchenware, and left you nothing. That’s what happened to an Ohio woman recently, and the police are refusing to help.

That’s because the perpetrator was First National Bank. Except Katie Barnett was not behind on her payments; the bank just repossessed the wrong house.

Fair enough. Mistakes happen. The bank is going to pay her back though, right?

Right?

The housing crisis has generated all manner of outrage and gnashing of teeth. Municipalities and pension funds were swindled, homes were lost, and taxpayers had to bail out the very entities that helped the crisis spiral out of control. But robbing (OK, burglaring, I’m being colloquial) completely unsuspecting bystanders is a new low:

Katie Barnett says that the First National Bank in Wellston foreclosed on her house, even though it was not her bank.

“They repossessed my house on accident, thinking it was the house across the street,” Barnett said.

Barnett, who had been away from the house for about two weeks, said she had to crawl through the window of her own house in order to get in after she used her own key that did not work.

Some of the items in her house had been hauled away, others were sold, given away and trashed.

How can something like this happen:

It turns out the bank sent someone to repossess the house located across the street from Barnett’s house, but by mistake broke into hers instead.

“They told me that the GPS led them to my house,” Barnett said. “My grass hadn’t been mowed and they just assumed.”

Damn you Apple Maps! Seriously though, this is why banks should only work with quality repossession agencies like Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation. Anyone get that? Pat yourself on the back.

I get why the police backed off the case — the bank made a mistake and presumably would set things right. Except the bank considered that, and opted for cartoonish supervillainy instead:

Barnett said that according to the bank president, this was the first time something like this has happened.

She presented him with an $18,000 estimate to replace the losses, but the president refused to pay.

“He got very firm with me and said, ‘We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,’” Barnett said. “I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back.”

The shock of having her house broken into and belongings taken by mistake has now turned into anger.

“Now, I’m just angry,” Barnett said. “It wouldn’t be a big deal if they would step up and say ‘I’m sorry, we will replace your stuff.’ Instead, I’m getting attitude from them. They’re sarcastic when they talk to me. They make it sound like I’m trying to rip the bank off. All I want is my stuff back.”

Apparently, the bank thinks it lives in the world of The Purge. But no, you can’t steal people’s stuff and get away with it. This story is the most bipartisan thing ever, with DailyKos and The Blaze getting riled up over it.

Now an observer might be tempted to say, “Well, the bank has a right to protect itself from someone making an inflated estimate of the damages,” and that’s fair. Except that’s not what the guy is quoted as saying. When he says, “We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,” he’s recognizing that the estimate accurately reflects replacement value and claiming that the bank is not willing to pay to replace the stuff they stole.

It’s all about not making the victim whole.

But the worst thing about this story is that it’s not as rare as one would hope:

Sadly, stories like this are all too common. In September 2012, subcontractors hired by Wells Fargo mistakenly foreclosed on the wrong home in California, destroying a man’s vacation home in the process.

A review of court records in 2012 by The Huffington Post revealed more than 50 lawsuits have been filed against banks and subcontractors who have entered and “foreclosed” on the wrong properties. Most of the suits are tied to two largest property management contractors in the U.S.: Safeguard Properties and Lender Processing Services.

Meanwhile, a petition has started to demand that the bank pay her back.

Filed Under: banks, foreclosure, homes

American Bankers' Association Claims Routing Numbers Are Copyrighted

from the um,-feist-feist-fesit dept

Reader J Cronin alerts us to the apparent fact that the American Bankers Association (ABA) believes that federal routing numbers are covered by its own copyright, and they've sent a takedown letter to a website that published routing numbers. Greg Thatcher runs a website that, among other things, publishes bank routing numbers. Those are the numbers that appear on the bottom of checks that basically tell you how to send the banks money. Thatcher gets those numbers directly from the Federal Reserve's website. Having a single source for those numbers is really useful for people trying to wire money, so you can see why Thatcher's page would be really popular with lots of people. But the ABA sent this bizarre email:

Demand for Immediate Take-Down: Notice of Infringing Activity
URL: http://www.gregthatcher.com/Financial/Default.aspx
Case #: 10
Date: 30 May 2013
Dear Sir or Madam,
The American Bankers Association has received information that the domain listed above, which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by the American Bankers Association 1. Identification of copyrighted works:
Copyrighted works:
ABA Routing Numbers
ABA Key to Routing Numbers
Copyright owner:
American Bankers Association
2. Copyright infringing material or activity found at the following location(s):

http://www.gregthatcher.com/Financial/Default.aspx
The above copyright works are being copied, displayed and made available for copying by others, including through downloading, at the above location without authorization of the copyright owner.
3. Statement of authority:
The information in this notice is accurate, and I hereby certify under penalty of perjury that I am authorized to act on behalf of American Bankers Association, the owner of the copyrights in the works identified above. I have a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above have been authorized by American Bankers Association, its agents, or the law. We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of these copyright works via your company's network. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter. Please advise us regarding what actions you take.

Yours sincerely,
Gareth Young
Internet Investigator
On behalf of American Bankers Association
1120 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington,
DC 20036.

As you'll probably note, this is a typical DMCA takedown notice. But it seems ridiculous that they're claiming copyright on routing numbers. Thatcher responded to their email, pointing out that he was providing information that came from the Federal Reserve. While I can understand where he's coming from, his argument doesn't really mean very much. The federal government can distribute copyrighted works. Just because the Fed is distributing it, doesn't mean it's automatically public domain (if they had created the numbers it would be a different story). It would seem that a much stronger argument is that there is no copyright in routing numbers because there is no creativity in them, and they are merely factual bits of information, and you cannot copyright facts.

Either way, the ABA's lawyers from bigshot law firm Covington and Burling shot back that the ABA had, in fact, been "creative" in creating those numbers, and thus it had a valid copyright.

The ABA Routing Number was originally developed by the ABA to identify only check processing endpoints, but has evolved over the years to also designate participants in automated clearinghouses, electronic funds transfer, and on-line banking. These advances in the ABA Routing Number were the result of significant effort and creativity by the ABA. Today there are thousands ABA Routing Numbers and they play a critical role in the integrity of bank payment systems. Each nine digit ABA Routing Number is an original copyrighted work carefully selected and arranged as a result of the ABA's creativity. Copyright exists from the moment of creation of each ABA Routing Number and registration in the United States is voluntary.

I have trouble seeing how that passes the laugh test. The lawyer who wrote those words, Nigel Howard, must have known they were ridiculous when he wrote them. He's an experienced lawyer. In the same letter (embedded below), Howard points out, reasonably, that the ABA is concerned about the continued dissemination of retired numbers. That's a legitimate concern, but it's not a copyright issue. It's also a concern that is easily taken care of by giving Thatcher up-to-date info on routing numbers, or (here's a crazy thought) having the ABA publish them itself. But, no, Howard explains:

The ABA is currently re-assessing with Accuity whether it will engage in any licensing programs, but does not have a licensing program available for websites like yours at the current time.

Well, maybe rather than bullying small sites like Thatcher's with expensive lawyers and highly questionable copyright claims, the ABA should be figuring out a way to fix that problem.

Filed Under: bankers, banks, copyright, facts, numbers, routing numbers
Companies: american bankers association

Banking Equipment Vendor Tries To Censor Security Research With DMCA Notice -- Then Backs Down When Called Out For It

from the abusing-the-system dept

Abuse of the DMCA takedown process to remove material that is awkward or embarrassing for a company is a common enough topic on Techdirt. But here's one with a slight twist. It concerns hardware security modules (HSMs), which manage the cryptographic keys and PINs used to authenticate bank card transactions. These were generally regarded as pretty secure -- until researchers started analyzing them, as Ross Anderson, head of the Security Research Laboratory at Cambridge University, explains:

[HSM's] application programming interfaces (APIs) had become unmanageably complex, and in the early 2000s Mike Bond, Jolyon Clulow and I found that by sending sequences of commands to the machine that its designers hadn't anticipated, it was often possible to break the device spectacularly. This became a thriving field of security research.

Of course, "thriving" here means "we found lots of security holes", which is why those manufacturing HSMs would rather people didn't do much research in this area. Recently, that desire led to the banking equipment manufacturer Thales sending a DMCA takedown notice to John Young, who runs the well-known Cryptome site, demanding that he remove a manual for one of their HSM products. What makes this demand particularly ridiculous is the fact that the manual had been on Cryptome since 2003 without any previous problems and, according to Young, is also widely available on the Internet, including from Thales itself.

But a blog post from Anderson detailing this clumsy attempt to remove something using the blunt instrument of a DMCA takedown notice suddenly brought the company to its senses. A few days after his post appeared, the same person who had sent Young the less-than-friendly takedown notice followed it up with this rather more chummy missive:

Thales is in no way trying to censor information that would benefit banking security research.

The information concerned, as has been noted, has been available since 2003 and is in fact obsolete. It also does not reflect the current Thales payment hardware security module.

So why on earth bother trying to take it down?

It is not unusual for Thales to suggest that out-of-date information is removed from web sites so that it doesn't cause confusion or mislead our customers. This would normally be handled with a polite request to the web site owner; on this occasion, unfortunately, we were over-zealous in initiating a takedown notice.

Well, there's rather a lot of "out-of-date" information on the Internet -- most of it, in fact -- and generally people don't resort to DMCA takedowns to try to remove it; "over-zealous" doesn't even begin to describe the disproportionate nature of the reaction here.

Thales fully appreciates the benefits of openly sharing information relating to our security products and fully supports legitimate academic research in this area. The most up-to-date and accurate information can be obtained directly from Thales.

Let's hope the company remembers that next time somebody posts information about security flaws in its systems.

I therefore wish to withdraw my earlier request for you to remove or disable access to the material in question and apologise for any distress it may have caused.

But as Young points out:

Credit for Thales' recantation goes to incorruptible security critic Ross Anderson who blogged and telephoned Thales to thrash the zealots

Indeed. And it really shouldn't be necessary for professors of computer security to waste their time exposing abusive DMCA takedowns in this way, when they could be more usefully winkling out yet more dangerous flaws in hardware security modules, for example....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: banks, censorship, copyright, dmca, security research
Companies: cryptome, security research labs

FBI, Working With Banks, Chose Not To Inform Occupy Leadership Of Assassination Plot On Its Leaders

from the gee,-thanks dept

Whatever you thought of the so-called "Occupy" movement of the past year or so, it seems clear that there has been at least a bit of overreaction to them. I mean, treating these protests, which have, by and large, been peaceful, as terrorist groups is just silly. But, as you may have seen over the past few days, that's exactly what the FBI did (as uncovered by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF)), and they did it in a coordinated manner with both Homeland Security and privately held banking corporations. This certainly isn't the first time government organizations have allowed for the appearance of impropriety this way, but just as when DHS held a press conference from Disney's HQ, there's a certain flaunting feeling when the coordination with private companies against the public is so blatant.

All that being said, you'd at least expect the FBI, no matter what level of corporate bowing they wish to engage in, to at least keep American citizens apprised of threats against their life. Unfortunately, it would appear the FBI disagrees when the citizens in question are Occupy leadership, as they allowed a plot to murder Occupy leadership in Texas with suppressed sniper rifles go untold until a rights group dug it up.

Last week, Digital Journal reported that the documents obtained by PCJF detailed how the FBI cooperated with the Department of Homeland Security, US military and private corporations to monitor and investigate Occupy Wall Street protesters as "domestic terrorists" and "criminals." The documents prove that federal agencies are "functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and corporate America," PCJF said.

Thorough analyses of the documents has now revealed a heavily redacted file that clearly mentions a plan to use snipers to assassinate Occupy protesters. The names of the groups or individuals involved in the murderous plot have been redacted, so it is impossible to identify them at this time. What is known is that the FBI never alerted any of the potential victims of the danger to their lives.

We're talking heavily redacted text here, which strips out a bunch of details, but here's the text that is available.

An identified [redacted] of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary. An identified [redacted] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [Redacted] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.

What's plain as day is that some group somewhere was plotting to murder OWS leadership in Texas. It's also clear that the FBI never bothered to inform the targets of the threats against their lives. This stands in apparent contrast to how closely they worked and coordinated with private banks to handle the OWS protests as a whole. And, remember, this is the same FBI who has put tremendous effort over the past few years into breaking up its own terrorist plots. You'd think that when it had a chance to go after actual plots to assassinate leaders of a political movement, they might, you know, actually do something and then trumpet the success in stopping a real plot. Apparently not.

So the lesson here is simple. If you're a private bank, the FBI will help you demonize non-violent protesters as "terrorists," but if you're a protester, you don't get to know that you might have an infrared dot dancing on the back of your head -- or have the FBI take it as serious as one of its own made up terrorist plots.

Filed Under: banks, fbi, foia, investigation, occupy, occupy wall street, plots

Big Banks Finally Punishing Employees For Fraud... Like The Call Center Guy Who Used A Fake Dime 50 Years Ago

from the rules-are-rules? dept

Wells Fargo, of course, was one of a bunch of the big banks heavily involved in questionable activities that brought the world to the precarious economic conditions we're still living in today. Just a few weeks ago, the company settled charges that it had misled cities and non-profits when selling them risky securities without disclosing the risks. The company gets a slap on the wrist -- without having to admit guilt -- and one executive (again without admitting guilt) gets a six month suspension. Have you heard about any top execs at any of the banks getting fired for financial malfeasance? No? Well, perhaps it's because they're focusing on the real trouble makers. Like Richard Eggers. 49 years ago, Eggers, as a teenager, tried to stick a cardboard cutout of a dime into a washing machine. He didn't get away with it at the time, and was arrested for fraud. He somehow put his life back together and, until recently, was a phone customer service agent for Wells Fargo.

And now he's really paying the piper: Wells Fargo has just fired him for the decades-old incident that, again, involved a dime. Even accounting for inflation, we're talking about a dime. However, thanks to supposedly "tough" new regulations concerning financial institutions, barring them from employing execs convicted of fraud, Wells Fargo is claiming that it had to fire Eggers.

“We don’t have discretion to grant exceptions in situations like this. Once we find out someone has a criminal history of dishonesty or breach of trust we can no longer employ them.”

Eggers has responded by filing a civil rights complaint against the company and federal regulators. He and his lawyers are hoping to turn it into a class action lawsuit, as apparently a number of other employees at banks have lost their jobs under these rules. Actual execs responsible for the financial crisis? Not so much.

This is yet another case where laws like this must "sound good at the time" to the policy makers putting them together without any sense of who it will really impact. And the end result is that we sure are making Mr. Eggers "pay" for that dime stunt in 1963, huh?

Filed Under: banks, firing, fraud, regulations, richard eggers, scams
Companies: wells fargo

Big Bank CEO Who Makes $23 Million Says Press Should Stop Focusing On Bank Compensation... Because Reporters Are Overpaid?

from the i'm-rubber-you're-glue dept

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who made approximately $23 million last year, apparently doesn't like the press picking on the salaries at big banks like his. So, he's telling them that they're the ones who are overpaid. To be fair, the context is that he's mocking reporters for focusing on the compensation ratio statistic that some have brought up in questioning how much banks pay their employees, by noting that the same ratio -- which he rightfully calls a "stupid ratio" -- doesn't necessarily look good for the newspaper industry either. Of course, most journalists just buzz right by that context and point out how ridiculous it looks for Dimon to complain about how much journalists make, coming from where he's sitting:

Dimon himself took home roughly $23 million in 2011, about the same as the year before, according to Bloomberg. Compare that to newspaper reporters, who earn an average salary of $43,780 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or between $20,000 and $60,000 per year according to Payscale.

For fun, let's just compare a bit more. The average reporter at The New York Times earns about $93,000 per year, according to Glassdoor.com. The New York Times Company reported an operating profit of $56.7 million in 2011.

Dimon's salary not only dwarfs that of us media-folk; he's also making millions more than most of his employees. The average JPMorgan employee made $341,552 last year, according to Bloomberg News.

The key point, here, is really that if you're trying to convince the press to stop focusing on stories about reasonable employee pay, you probably should not then directly state that their pay is "just damned outrageous," while then defending bank employee payments by saying, "We are going to pay competitively.... We need top talent, you cannot run this business on second-rate talent." The implication that the press gets from that -- perhaps on purpose -- is that the media shouldn't pay competitively, doesn't need top talent, and can run its business on second-rate talent. Some might argue that's already the case... but it's unlikely to get those "second-rate" reporters to drop the issue...

Filed Under: banks, compensation, jamie dimon, media, press, revenue, salaries

Judge: Not Having The Best Security Not Illegal; Defrauded Company Can't Blame Bank

from the required-security? dept

An interesting ruling coming out of Maine. A judge has sided with a bank, in a case in which a company tried to blame its bank for not having better security, after it was hit by a trojan horse password stealer on one of its computers and subsequently had scammers transfer about $600k out of its account. The judge agreed that the bank did not have particularly good security, but also noted that there is no legal requirement that the bank have the absolutely best security. This is definitely the right decision, even if some may have a gut reaction the other way. To some extent, the company has to take some responsibility for its own actions, and on the flip-side, one would hope that market pressures would drive the banks to implement better security. For example, in this case, the bank itself -- Ocean Bank -- is getting a ton of bad publicity about its really poor security due to this lawsuit. So, even if it's won the lawsuit, that hardly means the bank comes out of it unscathed.

Filed Under: banks, fraud, liability, security

Banks Can't Figure Out How To Spell Gadhafi, So They Can't Freeze His Assets

from the well-that's-an-issue dept

The new How to do Everything podcast recently took on the question of just how do you spell the current Libyan leader's name in English? Qadaffi? Khadafi? Gadaffy? It turns out that the "official" answer is Gadhafi, which is used by the AP and NPR -- and part of the reason why is that's how the man himself signed a letter he wrote to a second-grade class back in 1986 in response to their letters to him.

That's great for the press... but it leaves some others in a lurch. Apparently banks and other financial institutions are scrambling to figure out how to freeze assets of Gadhafi and others because they're not sure what names the accounts are really under.

Compounding things, for individuals with Arabic names, sanctions lists provide only a few alternate spellings. The U.S. Treasury Department offers 12 possible spellings for Moammar Gadhafi, though language experts say there are more than 100 for the family name alone.

Unlike other so-called script languages such as Chinese or Japanese, Arabic has no transliteration standards. Pronunciation of the same names varies by place, and written Arabic contains few vowels, opening the door to a larger range of acceptable translations. Mohamed can also be transliterated as Mahmut, Mehmud or dozens of other variants.

Banks allow clients to transliterate their names as they see fit when they open new accounts. When a government publishes a new watch list, the banks' software uses so-called fuzzy logic to search for alternative spellings, similar to how Google suggests alternative phrases when it detects a possible typo in a search.

Of course, all that assumes that they're opening accounts under their own names anyway... I would assume that many have hidden accounts under corporation names or front men or simply fictitious individuals, and you would think that those would be more significant... and much harder to track down.

Filed Under: banks, gadhafi, identity, spelling

BofA Tries To Foreclose On Home Despite Not A Single Missed Payment

from the merry-christmas dept

Perhaps rather than worrying so much about Wikileaks, or buying up hundreds of domain names involving various combinations of their top executives along with "sucks" or "blows," Bank of America should get its actual banking house in order. Consumerist has the story of how Bank of America tried to foreclose on a couple's home despite the fact that they'd never missed a payment (and the foreclosure was targeted for Christmas Eve, no less). The CT Watchdog site has all the ridiculous details, which get more and more ridiculous as you read through them.

The short(ish) version is this: the couple applied to refinance their home mortgage, as many people have done recently thanks to low mortgage rates. The plan was to use the refi to pay for some home improvements and to consolidate their debt by paying off whatever other debt they had. They asked the BofA rep they were working with for "the cheapest option," and the BofA rep simply put them into a program used for loan modifications -- specially developed for people who are behind on their mortgages, even though this couple was not. When they received the paperwork for this, they decided not to go with this program, because it had additional escrow costs and home insurance payments they didn't want -- so they instead decided they wanted a conventional mortgage.

What they didn't realize, was that as soon as the BofA rep put them into that particular "Making Home Affordable program," (even without the couple signing the documents) BofA immediately sent out a notification (without telling the couple) to the credit bureaus indicating that the couple wanted a loan modification due to financial difficulties. Almost immediately, all of their creditors freaked out: they dropped their credit limit on credit cards, had other creditors close their account, and had other debt automatically shifted to the highest possible interest rate category. Of course, this also killed any possibility of doing the refi, since their credit score no longer would allow a refi.

After many, many complaints to BofA, the bank apologized (in writing) and promised to remove the couple from being listed in the program and correct the credit report, but the couple was on their own in getting others to know about it. Except this foreclosure notice came months after BofA apologized and promised to fix things (which it hasn't fully done yet). The couple has been calling BofA to ask why and everyone they speak to notes that they've never missed a payment at all, but that the account is flagged as "under review." No one can explain why the foreclosure was set in motion.

Yes, this is a situation where BofA didn't just screw up, but after finally admitting its original error and promising to fix it, it has made an even bigger and more egregious error.

The TL:DR version: BofA screwed up and ruined a couple's (previously fine) credit rating, destroyed their plans for a mortgage refinance, and then after apologizing and promising to fix everything, decided to foreclose on the couple's house despite the fact that they'd never been late on a single payment.

Not surprisingly, the couple is now planning to sue BofA.

Filed Under: banks, credit, foreclosing, loans
Companies: bank of america

Shouldn't We Fix The Check Clearing Loophole That So Many Scammers Abuse?

from the simple-questions dept

Slashdot points us to a recent story about a guy who lost his lawsuit against a bank, over a variation on a classic Nigerian email scam. The scam is one we've discussed many times in the past: somehow the victim gets a big check, which they're expected to deposit in a bank. After the check "clears," the victim/recipient is supposed to transfer a large chunk of that money to the scammer, on the belief that they get to keep whatever is left over. What really happens is a few days after the check "clears," the bank finds out it's fraudulent, and tries to void the transaction. But, by then, the victim has already transferred out a big chunk of money (and the scammer has already taken all that cash out of the bank and disappeared) -- leaving the victim footing the bill, with the bank expecting them to come up with the missing cash. In this case, the scam took on all the familiar facets of this scam:

In March 2009, Brian Peters received an email from someone purporting to be a citizen of Malaysia. The e-mail informed Peters that certain third parties in the United States and Canada owed the purported Malaysian money, but that "they can not transfer the funds to any bank account outside America continent due to their new company policy [sic]." He asked Peters to "assist me in receiving the funds and forward to me." He offered to pay Peters 12 percent of the money. Peters agreed after apparently negotiating an increase of his fee to 15 percent.

Peters deposited the $808,988.90 in checks received from the purported Malaysian at Chino Commercial Bank. After the bank notified Peters that the checks had cleared, Peters wire transferred $468,000 to Hong Kong. Shortly thereafter, the checks were dishonored after the bank detected that they had been altered. Since Peters was personally liable for any overdrafts on the account, which had only a few thousand dollars, the bank sought to attach property owned by Peters to collect on the overdraft. The trial court granted the bank’s motion to attach against Peters in the amount of $458,782.60.

This certainly isn't the first such lawsuit. We wrote about a similar case two years ago, which involved some scammers tricking a law firm (who really should have known better). The reason this scam works over and over and over again is pretty simple: most people have no idea that when a check "clears," it's not actually been validated. This is apparently due to various laws that require banks to make money from checks available within a very short period of time. So the way banks deal with this is to just make the money available, and if they later find out that the check was fraudulent, they pull back the money. But, of course, most people don't know this and assume (somewhat reasonably) that if a check "clears" and the money is listed as "available," the bank has made sure the check is legitimate. This is a somewhat unintended consequence of laws to make paying by check work better, but it leads to a huge opening for these types of scams.

So if they need to do that, shouldn't it make sense for banks to at least put forth pretty clear warnings on money that has not really been validated yet? Or to at least proactively warn anyone seeking to withdraw money that hasn't really been validated that if the check fails to validate, they may be liable? It seems like there must be better ways to deal with this kind of scam than to just let the scammers keep taking advantage of this knowledge gap.

Filed Under: banks, checks, clearing, scams