So essentially someone writes you a check, you then bring the check into the bank and they take money out of that persons bank account and put it into yours. Just based on that slip of paper. So what stops anyone from writing fake checks, it seems like it would be really easy
(I’m a teenager so if this is completely wrong my apologies)
Edit: Thanks for the responses!
In: Economics
They will eventually contact the other bank to make sure that the sender has the funds available, if not they take the money back out of your account, charge fees, etc… This was a real problem back in the day, some lowlife people would write checks knowing they didn’t have the money and when the other person tried to cash it, the teller would say “your check bounced”. It was and still is a felony and is either theft (because you basically stole an item and pretended to pay it) or wire fraud depending on the jurisdiction. If you did it enough times they could blacklist you in the Chexsystem that banks use to determine credit status, which means you couldn’t get a line of credit or get a check book from any bank in the future.
Source: Old millennial.
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