Why even write the amount in words?

[dvandom]

A few weeks ago, I got a letter from my bank (not the statement, I won't get that for a week or two yet) and found that for the first time in years, I'd been overdrawn on my checking account (I had the money in savings, so I only got a $5 fee to transfer the money, but it was still annoying), by about a hundred bucks. I figured I'd just been careless about keeping track of things.

Turns out that when I wrote a check for $1071 to my credit card company last month, they cashed it for $1671. Despite the fact I'd written "One thousand seventy-one" on the check (I have those carbon copy checks, so I was able to confirm this), and if they'd been unsure whether my 0 was a 6 all they had to do was look a centimeter down.

In fact, I suspect they never even looked at the check itself, just at the "payment amount" box on the bill, and the bank blithely let them cash the check for more than the written amount. Once I get the statement, I think I'll take it and my checkbook down to the bank to bring this to their attention (I'll wait at least that long, in case they discover it themselves in going over my processed checks).

Comments

[querldox.livejournal.com]

I had something similar happen once, when the credit card company cashed the check for a few dollars less than the check due to a misread. I called them up, and likely because I also had always paid off my balance, they recinded the interest charge and treated it as a full payment without my having to provide any extra proof ("Can you think of any reason why someone who always pays if full would miss it by less than 10 dollars?" "Um, no. Let me fix this...")

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Dug out the statement (which included the money being paid, but not the check clearing), gonna go down tomorrow after work. Will also need to make sure that if there was anything negative entered on my credit report as a result, it gets erased. That's a LOT more important than my five bucks.