[Juniper]

Originally Posted by Iggy

I work for a bank. And I deal with what happened to Juniper on a daily basis. For one, $5,000 is a lot of money to take a loss on. Where I work (at a smaller local bank) any check over $2,000 is considered for a hold. (Your bank just said it was "pending", we say it is put on hold... same outcome) There are other kinds of holds, but when a bank puts a hold on your check, it is basically to make sure it clears. We purposefully delay the availability of that check.
Where I work, we have to give you a form when we do this. It tells you when the check will be available, and the reason we are holding it.

See, that's my main problem. They didn't tell me when the funds would be available. You gotta hold my check for a week? Fine, just let me know it's going to be treated differently from the hundreds of deposits I've made in the past.

Also, we deposit your credits BEFORE we debit your account for anything. For example... you have $5 in your account Friday morning. Lots of things come through overdrawing you before noon that day. You can come in at 5:30pm (or until we close, we stay on the same business day) with a deposit covering all those items. At the end of the business day, we rearrange everything so the deposit posts before anything comes through to overdraw your account... and you don't get ANY fees. Whereas some banks would charge you the fees, because technically you were spending money you didn't have in the bank.

I guarantee my bank does not do this. I've watched the transactions get posted, with my online account access, in the course of a day. The checks get taken out first thing in the morning, and if the balance isn't sufficient, it goes straight to my overdraft account. The deposits are usually credited around noonish.

Juniper might not think that $5,000 isn't a lot of money, if you don't have that much in your account than the bank would take a loss if the check came back. And banks don't like losses.

I don't mean to sound flippant about that amount of money; it sure would be a lot for ME to lose. My point is that it's not what I'd consider a "red flag" for unusual activity. But I guess rules are rules. Just wish they were enforced consistently.

As for the scam? We get people in all the time with checks around that amount, that ARE A SCAM. They don't know that the check is counterfeit. You knew the check was good, but the teller probably didn't know you from Adam, how are they supposed to know that you are one of the people that gets checks like those sometimes??

A few months ago I made a similar deposit and the teller asked me what the check was for. I told her, and she said OK, she just wanted to make sure it was legit. There, wasn't that simple?

Oh well. Older and wiser, live and learn.