Amanda continues to take on the money-and-ethics-poor CIBC after they cashed post-dated cheques she wrote, prior to the date on the cheque when insufficient funds were in her account. Thus the bank ruined her credit report, and still wants her to pay them fees that their mistake generated.
I wrote about the Bank’s Theoretical Electronic Funds Transfer (THEFT for short)(TM) previously, and the story attracted some attention in the blogosphere.
Stuff we learned from this escapade:
1) Post dating is, in fact, valid.
2) Cheques are not eligible to be cashed until the date shown on the face.
3) If the bank puts thru your post dates before the date, you will need the power of leprachauns to rectify the situation.
4) Leprachauns are growing weary of their duties.
5) This is why banks operate above the law.
May the Leprachauns be with you Amanda. Good luck.
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Amanda | 30-Sep-06 at 11:31 am | Permalink
I *love* the THEFT (TM) acronym. I believe I may use that at some point in the future. Possibly in the letter to the editor. Stay tuned. The fight is not over yet.
talk talk talk | 30-Sep-06 at 11:32 am | Permalink
CIBC continues to boggle my mind. When I first started banking with them, they couldn’t wait to do business with me. Then the bank decided all loan decisions needed to be done centrally or some such nonsense, replaced loan officers with unthinking minions, and when I was finally forced to take all my business elsewhere (though I never missed a payment), called to ask if they could do business with me. Uh sure, except it’s too late and it wasn’t me who objected in the first place!
In the middle of all this, they told me that dates on cheques are meaningless. Really? How come only the banks know this? I feel sorry for those leprachauns. Good luck Amanda!
Saskboy | 30-Sep-06 at 11:37 am | Permalink
I love THEFT too Amanda. My brain almost imploded with self satisfaction when I thought of it.
Their own website admits post-dating is valid TTT. I’ve got stories about Royal Bank too. And Stephen Glauser is working on his blog post about BMO. As Amanda said, stay tuned for more whacky and unethical Big 5 Bank tales.
James Bow | 30-Sep-06 at 12:41 pm | Permalink
This is why I belong to a credit union.
Saskboy | 30-Sep-06 at 12:52 pm | Permalink
James, a CU can help, but they aren’t above doing strange things, especially when it comes to loans. I don’t know the tales as well because they didn’t happen to me and I heard them when I was a kid, so I won’t name names in this case.
Stephen Glauser | 30-Sep-06 at 1:02 pm | Permalink
I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about credit unions, and I couldn’t live without the functionality of dealing with a big five.
I have to have fully-functioning online banking that helps me manage my cash, investments and loans. I need to be able to email people money (you’d be surprised how often I use email money transfer) and most of all I must have access to a bank branch anywhere I go.
I just don’t feel comfortable using a local credit union.
That being said. All banks suck.
Saskboy | 30-Sep-06 at 1:18 pm | Permalink
All banks do suck at some point or another. I’ve had relatively glitch free banking with ING though, and if they offered a no-fee chequing account I’d do that with them as well as my savings.
14220777S1 ING code
Anyone who opens their first ING savings account using a referral code, gets $13 free (me too) [if their opening balance is $100 or more]. Since ING is an insured bank, there’s no risk, and you don’t have to do anything online you can use the phone, existing chequing account, and ATMs to get your money out of the ING high interest/no fee savings account. I wouldn’t recommend ING for just $13, unless I trusted them too, and to this point they are the best bank I’ve found.
Stephen Glauser | 30-Sep-06 at 2:16 pm | Permalink
If ING offered checking I would definitely go with them. Since I don’t use a bank account for savings (would much rather invest my money and actually try to have my money work for me), I have yet to open up an ING account. Good service from what I’ve heard though.
Adrian MacNair | 30-Sep-06 at 3:27 pm | Permalink
Is President’s Choice offered through CIBC? I’ve heard good things about PC, although I’m with BMO. I’ve had a few annoyances with BMO, namely they have infrequent locations in Vancouver. I pay their lame transactions fees and yet still manage to pay double that amount in extra transactions (note to self: $100 withdrawl at a time will end up biting you in the ass). I also tried to add my wife to the account and we had to close my existing account, open a new one, and I lost my automatic cashing option on cheques, plus they charged me a fee… I’ve long considered banks a form of the sheer evil of capitalist guile. If only there were non-profit national banks of the people, by the people, for the people.
Saskboy | 30-Sep-06 at 5:30 pm | Permalink
Yes PC is through CIBC in some way. They have no fee chequing I’ve heard, but I was grandfathered into a no fee chequing on TD [if I keep a min balance of $___] so I stay with that and keep the min-balance. That way I don’t have to reprint cheques. Plus my bill payments an ING are set up to use that account anyway. Oh, speaking of bill payments, time to test out my online banking from Ubuntu Linux Firefox.
James Bow | 30-Sep-06 at 5:56 pm | Permalink
My savings account is with ING, and no complaints there.
Ashley | 30-Sep-06 at 6:37 pm | Permalink
I use PC Financial for my chequing account. It works great for me, but for my mom, who has a habit of losing cards, cheques, etc etc, its not so great. If you lose your bank card, you have no access to your money until you get a new one. Because new cards are mailed to you from Toronto, it could be a couple weeks until you can get into your account. Same applies if your card stops working for some reason.
Personal, i use PC for chequing, ING for savings, and I have an account with one of the big 5 “just in case” I cant access my chequing account at some point in time for a couple weeks.
Miss Cellania | 30-Sep-06 at 7:30 pm | Permalink
Have you heard from any Canadian lawyers in the Blogosphere about this?
Adrian MacNair | 30-Sep-06 at 8:28 pm | Permalink
About Ubuntu, off topic, I have an old computer from 1998. AMD Athlon 850 with only 128 MB of RAM. After 5 attempts to install Ubuntu and breaking my CD-ROM in anger, I realized Ubuntu requires a minimum of 192 MB of RAM to install!!! Sucks, since I am stuck with Win2k or else I have to spend cash on a new computer :(
Saskboy | 30-Sep-06 at 8:35 pm | Permalink
Nothing from a lawyer about this yet Miss C.
Adrian, I feel your pain. That computer if you want to make it a simple web surfer, you could run http://www.damnsmalllinux.org on it, which could run entirely within the 128MB of RAM and no hard drive needed.
If it’s your main computer, maybe give another distribution a try? I’m sure there are pleny of modern Linux systems that work with just 128MB, maybe Mandriva?
Amanda | 02-Oct-06 at 2:51 pm | Permalink
Due to threats of legal consequences, I have chosen to disable viewing of the “bank rage” posts linked to in your article, saskboy.
I received a call from the bank manager today who spoke to me about them. They had been faxed to her from an anonymous fax machine. When she told me she was at a real loss of what to do, whether she should forward this on to her legal branch or what, I replied that that would be fine, because all of it is true. However she pointed out to places wherein I referred to “assholes” and “losers” etc which she implied would be problematic. I have no idea if it really would be. But. I have decided to pull the posts for now.
If you would like, you can “friend” me on LJ and then you will have free viewing access of all applicable “bank rage” rants.
When this issue is resolved to my satisfaction, I will be posting a Publicly Accessible post. Until the arrival of such a creature, you can assume that the issue is still in “limbo”.
I was assured that it should be rectified by the end of today. So, whereas I’m a *little* irked that someone faxed these off to the branch when they knew full well I was handling things already, it seems to have done the trick. It seems the situation will be resolved shortly.
Saskboy | 03-Oct-06 at 5:55 pm | Permalink
I’d guess it’s not fixed yet?
Saskboy | 10-Oct-06 at 2:07 pm | Permalink
UPDATE: Amanda’s CIBC branch manager finally fixed the problems created by the branch staff’s cashing of the post dated cheques.
Manny | 05-Dec-06 at 10:57 am | Permalink
I find it so amusing that us customers think we can go to another bank and get treated any differently (i.e. better). All the banks are the same…so suck it up and stop complaining. The mistake is yours…you wrote the cheque, you are responsible. Simple! What seems to be the problem?
Saskboy | 05-Dec-06 at 12:03 pm | Permalink
The problem Manny, is that they cashed it when their policy was not to cash it. Ergo, they made an exception that caused avoidable financial loss to their customer.
Amanda | 05-Dec-06 at 12:47 pm | Permalink
A cheque is a legal contract that states on X day, X amount of dollars shall be withdrawn from X account by X customer. In a legal contract, all details must be complied with or the contract is considered null and void. So Manny, if you ever sign a car lease that says you shall be making payments in the amount of X for X number of months, and the bank instead withdraws the full amount from you account in one lump, I expect not to hear you complaining. You signed the lease, so you are responsible! Simple! What seems to be the problem?
Manny | 05-Dec-06 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
Yeah, Right…it’s their policy not to cash cheques…good one Saskboy. Understand that writing a post dated cheque is not the same as signing up to pay 12 Lease payments. Writing a cheque is like giving cash…you are promising to pay somebody except in this case it’s a piece of paper representing the funds in an account. Would you give somebody cash and tell them not to spend it for the next week? No you wouldn’t. So what’s the difference with a cheque? and I still don’t know why you are complaining? You wrote a cheque (you promised that you would pay somebody) and it went through…what’s the issue. The date’s got nothing to do with it! The problem is you giving the cheque to somebody and asking them not to negotiate it for the next X days.
In regards to the cheque being a contract, that contract is between you and the payee…not between you and the bank! Have you ever read the fine print on some of those brochures? The banks cover themselves from every single angle and put the responsibility right back to the account owner…yes, that would be you and me. We have no one to blame for our banking stupidity except us. In this case, you.
I got a quick questions: which bank did the cheque get deposited into (or did the payee physically go into your home branch and cash the cheque right out of your account)?
I am just amused that after all is said and done, after putting the account in the hole, after ruining her credit, the bank still wanted the fees that the insufficient funds costed. Ha! Please understand that I am not laughing at you but I have been there and you just have to shake your head at this.
Saskboy | 05-Dec-06 at 10:18 pm | Permalink
Manny, are you getting Amanda and I confused? I’m just telling her story on my blog here.
“The date’s got nothing to do with it! The problem is you giving the cheque to somebody and asking them not to negotiate it for the next X days.”
I don’t think so, and neither does common sense. It’s common practice for some places to ask for post dated cheques, and if dates didn’t matter, then they wouldn’t put a date field on each cheque. I understand you’re not defending the bank, but don’t pretend they even had a legal leg to stand on. They did eventually fix their mistake, and yes it was a mistake to cash post dated cheques which are obviously not valid due to the date on them. It’s not the same as handing someone a cheque with today’s date and asking them not to cash it until next month.
Amanda | 06-Dec-06 at 9:00 am | Permalink
Manny, it sounds like you have been fed the same BS that I have, and that you have unfortunately been indoctrinated. Banks don’t LIKE dealing with post dated cheques because they are a pain in their ass, but the fact of the matter is, they have a policy in place to deal with them. They just don’t tell you this and discourage you from writing them at all, trying to scare you. Here is the direct quote from their home page:
http://www.cibc.com/ca/faq/personal-bank-accnts.html
8. What is a post-dated cheque?
A cheque that is dated ahead is post-dated and cannot be processed until the day indicated. An item may be returned for the reason “post-dated” up to and including the day prior to the due date.
“cannot be processed until the day indicated”
That would mean that the date actually DOES have something to do with it. I really, really hope that you do not live in a province (state) where landlords can legally require post-dates as a condition of your lease. Because, as you see, post-dates and car-lease payments really are exactly the same. Now. Please just stop. This matter has been a major thorn in my side and is still not completely resolved, and you have been provided with point-blank official evidence that the bank was in the wrong.
Manny | 06-Dec-06 at 10:46 am | Permalink
Amanda, where did the cheque actually get deposited? Isn’t it that branch’s fault for acepting a post dated cheque?
Also, read your comments about the manager and it’s refreshing to see that you are able to give credit where it’s due.
Amanda | 06-Dec-06 at 2:59 pm | Permalink
Manny:
The cheque was deposited at the same branch and the same institution from which it was drawn. There is only one institution and one branch involved in this situation.
Since it was deposited in person, there are many places that this error could have been caught: the teller accepting the cheque, the CSM who must authorize each teller’s batches, and the processing centre to which all of the batches are shipped at the end of the day. All of these measures are in place to catch such a thing. Whereas its irritating enough that it slipped thru all of these checks and measures, it is even more irritating that it took nearly three months to rectify it once the situation was acknowledged by the bank!
I hope now you are more aware of the legalities and realities regarding such things. I am sure that, if the roles were reversed, you would not be very impressed with someone telling you to just suck it up.
redmojo | 28-May-09 at 9:58 am | Permalink
Saskboy, I was wondering if you have ever read the fine print that poses as a dotted line where you give your signature? If you still have a personal bank cheque laying around, check it out for yourself!
Saskboy | 28-May-09 at 11:57 am | Permalink
I had a cheque, but no magnifying glass on me unfortunately. Doesn’t it say something like microprintmicroprint?