>Not sure what the bank wasting its efforts trying to combat this would accomplish.
It would prevent me from losing my money! I filed a fraud claim form that also required an affidavit with notarized signature and Bank of America still won't return the stolen money. That money is gone.
>The system you're envisioning whereby banks refuse payment on otherwise valid checks based on Reasons seems a lot crazier.
My point is that BofA computer systems already have some aspects of "suspicious activity" algorithms and heuristics in place to prevent counterfeit checks stealing funds from the account. The banks are already "wasting effort" as you put it to try and distinguish real vs fake checks. E.g. When the landscaper tried to cash my legitimate check that had my handwriting and my signature, the bank sent me a phone alert which I then had to explicitly approve. Otherwise, they would reject the check. (An example of "Reasons" as you put it.) This is what the verification alert that requires explicit approval looks like: https://imgur.com/a/62dCsBx
But the next check a month later that someone faked, with a weird sequence #, without any signature, and the "payee" to a company notoriously known for unauthorized checking account withdrawals and fraud... No alert for my approval was sent; instead, they just went ahead and paid it.
If the banking system allows 3rd parties to fabricate e-checks with no verification, they should also offset that dangerous power by allowing account holders the security tools to stop those types of echecks from being cashed. E.g. a smartphone approval step.
> It would prevent me from losing my money! I filed a fraud claim form that also required an affidavit with notarized signature and Bank of America still won't return the stolen money. That money is gone.
As someone who was previously a customer of Bank of America and suffered my own form of theft and fraud (I was pickpocketed and someone used my debit card illicitly afterwards before I could cancel it). I can tell you with an absolute certainty that your experience is very specific to Bank of America or large national banks generally and not any sort of rule or law.
Do yourself a big favor and close your accounts with BoA and join a local/regional credit union. Nearly a decade after my first incident, I had another issue and the experience and how I was treated by my credit union vs how BoA treated me were worlds apart.
Either one will require an affidavit, the credit union offers members a free notary service at any branch so I simply filled it in person at a branch. The affidavit is to protect the bank by ensuring you are liable for false statements. The credit union also helped me pressure the police to actually do something, which resulted in three arrests of a group of teenagers that had more than 800 stolen cards in their possession when arrested. And I had the stolen funds returned to my account the same day at the branch, good as cash.
In that interim decade I stopped carrying a debit card and only used credit cards because of how badly my experience with BoA was. I now know that it’s not the card you use, it’s the /bank/ you use that makes the difference.
It is likely because the bank doesn’t know what checkbooks you own and use, and has no way to know it. You could have ordered more third-party checks (legal, not fabricated), and if you do, commonly you would use a different sequence starting point for those, so that you can distinguish which checkbook you used. More commonly the case for businesses but you can buy them from Intuit for example: https://intuitmarket.intuit.com/checks
It would prevent me from losing my money! I filed a fraud claim form that also required an affidavit with notarized signature and Bank of America still won't return the stolen money. That money is gone.
>The system you're envisioning whereby banks refuse payment on otherwise valid checks based on Reasons seems a lot crazier.
My point is that BofA computer systems already have some aspects of "suspicious activity" algorithms and heuristics in place to prevent counterfeit checks stealing funds from the account. The banks are already "wasting effort" as you put it to try and distinguish real vs fake checks. E.g. When the landscaper tried to cash my legitimate check that had my handwriting and my signature, the bank sent me a phone alert which I then had to explicitly approve. Otherwise, they would reject the check. (An example of "Reasons" as you put it.) This is what the verification alert that requires explicit approval looks like: https://imgur.com/a/62dCsBx
But the next check a month later that someone faked, with a weird sequence #, without any signature, and the "payee" to a company notoriously known for unauthorized checking account withdrawals and fraud... No alert for my approval was sent; instead, they just went ahead and paid it.
If the banking system allows 3rd parties to fabricate e-checks with no verification, they should also offset that dangerous power by allowing account holders the security tools to stop those types of echecks from being cashed. E.g. a smartphone approval step.