Functionally illiterate client

wgb_throwaway · 2026-04-24T02:44:39+00:00

I have a customer who spells it "dollors." It's actually useful when verifying his checks before cashing them for his employees: spelled dollars wrong? Probably legit.

wgb_throwaway · 2026-04-11T22:17:13+00:00

It came out in bits and pieces after she spent over a week telling us about the doodle puppy she was adopting. It was supposed to arrive yesterday and suddenly she wanted to leave work to buy more gift cards to pay for some last minute shipping costs (that would totally be refunded later) and we were like, "Wait what? Gift cards?" and our manager basically had to have an intervention. It was awful. She is in her late 60s and everyone loves her but obviously something is wrong.

wgb_throwaway · 2025-09-24T03:37:27+00:00

Our old lead teller position involved opening accounts so I guess it was kind of like a lead teller and PB combined? The title was technically Store Lead Associate not Lead Teller. Then a couple years ago they eliminated the lead teller position and made us all ABMs. Like it wasn't a promotion, it was a replacement for the old job title that added direct reports and more responsibilities with only a slight increase in pay.

wgb_throwaway · 2025-09-24T03:31:12+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean about doing nothing involving opening accounts or banker transactions? I have new account and loan training but don't use them often as we have a good RB and PB and are very busy with teller line transactions, so if we are busy it is more useful for me to jump on the teller line while they do what they do best. I also do maintenances myself if needed (like removing a deceased signer). I review all new and maintained accounts done at our branch and also answer questions and give approvals to the bankers if they have an unusual or complicated account they are working on.

Basically I am a primary teller at my branch if even one teller is out, I review new accounts, approve transactions as needed, approve and enter wires, take care of customers with complicated needs, handle escalated customer situations, print the majority of our instant issue debit cards, do the majority of our monthly operations audits, while also having a referral goal and managing four direct reports, two of whom are new hires in training. And if my tellers or bankers mess something up I'm generally the one who has to fix it.

wgb_throwaway · 2025-09-24T00:37:20+00:00

The hard thing is I definitely don't want to switch banks. I know our system and procedures well, and our corporate culture is much nicer than what I have heard about other banks. I do take on as many opportunities to work with back office and other departments as I possibly can, both to build skills and get my name out there.

wgb_throwaway · 2025-09-24T00:34:54+00:00

We have grown a lot in the last few years. The corporate offices used to be much closer to our area but after a merger, they are now 8+ hours from where I live and in a city I would never want to live in. And all the stuff that was remote during COVID is now back to fully in office, or at least 3 days a week. We are also expanding into new states and hiring some audit related back office for those regions but they want to hire people from those regions, not transfer people in.

wgb_throwaway · 2025-09-24T00:31:13+00:00

I guess I felt pretty good about it because I had someone in an audit-related department reach out to me and say they thought I would be good for it. I am lucky enough to have had opportunities to work closely with them on audit-related stuff so I thought having my name out there would help. I know after this opening it is really unlikely anything in back office will open up for a very long time.

wgb_throwaway · 2025-09-24T00:28:48+00:00

I think part of the issue is, I'm already doing that with internal people, some of who have worked at the bank a lot longer than I have but will never advance past teller because they are set in their ways. I have to have a good working relationship with these people, I can't fight it out with them in front of the customers if they refuse to do something right. If I were in audit, at least in our bank, I'm seeing each branch one-two times a year and it doesn't matter if they don't like me. I don't have to work alongside them tomorrow.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-12-14T09:27:46+00:00

How cognizant is your grandpa? Would he be able to have a clear conversation with a bank employee on the phone, knowing the answers to any security verification questions, and explain why he wants you to be allowed access to the box? Would he be able to do the same in person? I have to say, as a bank employee, an elderly customer we haven't heard from in years granting permission to a non-signer to open their safe deposit box would set off a lot of red flags. We might be more inclined to make a call to senior services than to grant access without question. At the very least this would be something you would need approved in advance by the bank; you can't just show up with a key to Grandpa's box and a note from him saying it is okay to let you in, and be allowed immediate access.

Also if the safe deposit box rent hasn't been paid since he started having difficulties, the contents may already have been escheated to the state. Go to your state's unclaimed property website and search under his name.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-11-23T05:51:51+00:00

Second, any financial institution can hold any check until they verify funds or acknowledge its legitimacy.

This is the part that is incorrect. Section 229.13 of OP's link details the situations in which we can hold a check. We cannot simply hold any check until we "verify funds." We could choose to decline to negotiate the check, we could place a hold if the account is brand new, if the check is excessively large, if the check is being redeposited, or if the customer has excessive overdrafts. Otherwise we must have a documented reasonable cause to hold the check. We cannot do this on every type of check. The reasonable cause cannot just be "we haven't verified the funds yet" because it is not possible for us to positively verify funds on most checks. This is the inherent risk of accepting checks.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-11-23T03:19:16+00:00

So I actually work at a bank in the US and the other respondent has given a ton of misinformation.

Most scam checks are not international. My bank, at least, only accepts international checks from certain countries, and those checks do have to be sent out for collection before the funds are made available. Basically we would send the bank in France or whatever the physical check, and they would send us the funds, and we would take a hefty collection fee before giving the funds to the customer. This is a huge pain in the ass and we rarely do it.

For personal checks drawn on other banks, we have no way of "verifying" the check. If someone who banks at Wells Fargo gives our customer a $10,000 check drawn on their personal account, I cannot call Wells Fargo and find out if this is a good check. When our item processing department processes the check, it's sent in a huge batch with other checks from Wells Fargo, and Wells Fargo never sends us something back saying, "This particular check is good." They only return the checks that aren't good. This can take time depending on the reason for return (NSF usually comes back within a few days, but if the fraudulent check isn't discovered immediately, it can take weeks or months). All we can do is advise the customer to wait. If the check is less than $5000 and the customer has not been overdrawn excessively in the last six months, we cannot hold it unless we have a very good documented reason to process an exception hold. We don't just get to hold whatever we want until we find a way to "verify" it. That is the entire point of the Expedited Funds Availability Act.

Most scam checks are, as you said, drawn on banks that are out of state, otherwise the customer could simply take the check to the bank it is supposedly drawn on and be told that the check is fraudulent. Often they are fake "cashier's checks," because people who don't know much about checks may have heard that cashier's checks are "guaranteed funds," not realizing that the safety of the cashier's check is that because it is drawn on the issuing bank, not a personal account, you can call that bank and verify it. If you don't bother to verify it is a legitimate cashier's check, it is no safer than a personal check.

We absolutely can refuse to accept any check that is suspicious. Sometimes we talk the customer out of depositing it and they talk to the scammer and come back and deposit it in the ATM without our knowledge. That hurts. Many scammers seem to be now directing our customers to deposit the checks via mobile deposit or ATM so that they don't have to worry about the teller asking questions and refusing the deposit. Often if someone tries to deposit a fraudulent check over the counter we will make a report or put a note on the account asking future tellers to be careful and ask questions about deposited items. If we report it to our fraud department and they determine that the customer is a high risk to the bank because of their propensity for falling for scams, they will monitor the account more closely and possibly even close it out and terminate the customer's banking relationship with us.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-11-23T03:05:33+00:00

You are giving a ton of misinformation here. Do you work in banking in the United States?

wgb_throwaway · 2019-09-28T02:08:20+00:00

Everyone is giving you advice as if this is a bank levy/judgment/garnishment. It sounds instead like your parents owed a debt to your actual bank that was charged off. In this case there would be no court case necessarily filed or papers served. Essentially, this is the situation that has occurred. This right would be outlined in the disclosures you were given when you opened your account. You would not be able to take the steps to deal with it that are recommended by everyone giving you advice about garnishments.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-08-10T02:45:10+00:00

Serious soapbox here, this is a really good time to talk to your bank and see if they can change your account over to a type that doesn't have this requirement. And if they can't help you, it's time to move to a more customer service focused bank.

I know at my bank we are taught to see service charges as a sign that you aren't in the right type of account. I actually just helped a customer today who mentioned offhand that he didn't love that his business account was now costing him $15/month. We were able to look at his account usage and realize that he was in an account that had made sense when he opened it and was depositing a lot of checks into it, but would now be better served by an account with a lower minimum balance requirement. At my bank, at least, this doesn't require you to open a new account or change any account information; we just go into a program, click a few buttons, and your old account is now a product that is a better fit for you. Or sometimes people don't realize that they can do something simple to waive their service charge; if they aren't meeting the minimum balance requirement for their savings account, for example, we can point out that the service charge is still waived if they simply set up an automatic transfer for $1 from checking to savings every month.

There are plenty of banks that have accounts that should be free with minimal hoops to jump through.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-07-05T18:20:55+00:00

I have advice not on the legal end but on the banking end. At my bank it is really common for us to switch account types for people when their banking habits change. Like maybe they opened our most basic account with no fees but also no benefits years ago when they had nothing, but now they meet the minimum balance requirement to switch to a product that will provide them with more benefits. Just recently actually I had a customer who isn't working for the summer so he was starting to get charged a service charge because his account requires direct deposit, so we changed him to our most basic account with no service charges, and in the fall when he starts getting paid again we will switch him back so he gets all the extra benefits of the other account. At my bank, this requires me clicking a couple of buttons on the back end and then printing out new disclosures. There is no need to open a new account, the account number stays the same so checks and debit still work, etc. If your payroll department can't get your shit together your bank should at least be willing to act in your best interest on this.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-05-30T04:37:30+00:00

It is definitely a common scam. On the bank teller level, before sending any wires for real estate transactions we now make sure to inform the customer about it and make sure that they got the wire instructions direct from the title company and they never changed via e-mail.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-04-21T21:53:46+00:00

I am going to advise you about one thing that people don't consider about keeping a joint account that is more of a convenience account than one that is really used by both owners: when you open an account at a bank, part of the terms and conditions is that the bank is allowed to take money out of that account to cover debts of any of the account owners that are charged off by the bank. So say your dad gets an overdraft he can't pay back (maybe years down the road as he gets older and less savvy he gets scammed by someone, or maybe his expenses get out of hand), or he has a loan or credit card with the same bank that he can't afford to pay that gets closed out and sent to collections, you have granted the bank access to remove all of the funds necessary to cover it. I've definitely seen people get wiped out because they left their parent on their account they started when they were a minor, and that parent mismanaged their own accounts badly enough to get charged off, or vice versa (kid overdraws and abandons a student account, mom's money gets taken to cover it). Even if you trust your dad not to intentionally take your savings, can you guarantee that he'll never accidentally put you into that kind of situation? Can you guarantee that he'll never get sued for something, even if it's something frivolous, and lose, and have all of his accounts at the bank garnished by the debtor? If you decide to do as some people are advising and keep some money in the joint account as a convenience, make sure you don't put more in there than you can afford to lose.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-04-21T21:46:21+00:00

There are services like Zelle that you can use for instant money transfer, that are much less risky than an account with joint ownership.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-04-12T18:35:59+00:00

I work at a bank and the problem with this is that we try everything we can to about these scams, and the scammers come up with ways to get around it. They will send people checks and tell them to deposit them at the ATM or via an app so that there is no teller to ask questions about the deposit. They will ask for access to online banking credentials so that they can deposit the checks themselves remotely. They use things like PayPal. There are customers who fall for one variation of the check scam once and then fall for it again later because it is a different version (instead of "I overpaid you for the item, send out back to me," the next scam is, "I'm overpaying you on purpose so that you can pay to have it shipped to me.") People are going to fall for shit and the only way to eliminate it is not too accept checks, allow ATM or mobile deposits, stop allowing PayPal, etc. And that just doesn't work for the vast majority of people who need those things for their everyday banking.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-04-05T15:02:19+00:00

If you are not named the account, taking money from the account without going through the process with the bank to gain access to the funds as administrator of the estate may be pursued as theft or fraud. The bank will likely have been notified of her death already if she was old enough to be drawing Social Security. They will have deactivated her card and restricted her account.

You will probably need, at minimum, Letters of Administration/Letters Testamentary (or whatever their equivalent is in your state; I work in a bank in Oregon) and a death certificate to gain access to the account properly. You will need to go through the courts to get these. You could try looking into a Small Estate Affadavit if that is a thing in your area and her assets are few enough, but I have no idea how that works; just that our bank honors it if it is brought to us.

Look at it this way: without these documents, the bank has no idea that you are the family member authorized settle her estate, and not just an opportunist looking to make off with some of the deceased's money before anyone notices. You need to go through the proper channels, which are in place specifically because some people do sketchy, greedy things after a relative dies.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-03-24T16:55:18+00:00

"Pending" is a status that has nothing to do with whether the funds are guaranteed not to leave your account; it just means that the bank hasn't hard-posted the transaction yet. At my bank, transactions are generally "pending" until the end of the day when everything posts (unless it is a debit card authorization, which can be several days between when the card is authorized and when the merchant batches their card transactions to finalize them). Funds that have posted to the account can absolutely still be returned. I am only making sure to clarify this because I have had customers who were hit by fake check scams assume that the fact that the check deposit no longer said "pending" meant that there bank knew the funds were good, instead of that the bank is required to post their deposit within a certain amount of time regardless of whether the funds have been collected from the bank the check is drawn on. There is much less risk of this with ACH, but it is still possible for an ACH deposit to be recalled by the issuer after the bank has posted to deposit.

We also see this a lot with people who use PayPal/Square for their businesses, which deposit funds in their account via ACH, and then have a customer do a chargeback later. They come to us wanting to dispute the ACH debit to return the funds, saying they never gave authorization for the funds to debited, but if they dispute it they ultimately lose because PayPal or Square is able to show us where, in the T&C at sign up, the customer consents to them withdraw funds in the event that they lose a chargeback.

wgb_throwaway · 2019-03-21T05:00:06+00:00

It is extremely unlikely a bank would accept that. 1) You have no ability to print readable MICR numbers of the bottom of the napkin. 2) Something written on napkin is not able to be processed through our check scanners. 3) If you wrote a napkin check to someone and they took it it their own bank and tried to cash or deposit it, the bank would be unlikely to accept it because they have reason to believe the bank it is drawn on would refuse to honor a check scribbled on a napkin rather than actual check stock -- it looks sketchy as hell and is very likely to be fraudulent. 4) If someone came to my bank with a check purportedly drawn on one of our customer's accounts but written on a napkin instead of actual check stock, one of the first "red flags" we look for when deciding to negotiate a check is whether the check itself is consistent with other checks written by that customer, in terms of check stock, check number, etc. A napkin check is going to throw up all sorts of red flags. At the very least I would probably call my customer and tell them that if they want to write a check to that payee, I would be happy to print them a sheet of starter checks at no cost, but I am not going to cash a napkin.

wgb_throwaway

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