Re: AT&T charges extra to pay cash [Telecom]

I work for a major international bank, albeit not in the checking part of the house.

Opting out of ACH conversion is, frankly, silly. Trust me, the moment that paper check hits the depositor's bank or the clearing-house, it's going to be scanned and shredded.

I'm not debating the merits of Check 21; I'm personally not thrilled about it myself. The banks, however, are all for it. Consider a large bank like Bank of America. Can you imagine how much money used to be spent just hauling cancelled checks back and forth? The trucks, the gas, the security, the extra postage for the check drafter's statement... all for little slips of paper that most people throw out when they arrive in the mail.

By scanning the checks as soon as possible when they hit the banking system and converting them to data, all that expense of moving physical paper around vanishes. In this day and age, money *is* data. Even before Check 21, the movement of the paper check through the ACH system didn't control where your funds were at any given time -- it was the movement of bits through ACH systems that moved the money from one account to another.

Several banks have even been working with ATM vendors on creating ATMs that will accept checks through a slot-feed mechanism, without an envelope. The ATM would scan the check as it was inserted and convert it to an ACH draft, and shred the check within the ATM after the customer verifies the scanned information.

On the Telecoms side of on-line card transactions, where I work we have an ISDN service (2B+D) which uses the D channel as transport to a X25 network (then to our bank) for on-line card transactions.

This is a specific service (called Argent) set up by the local telco (Telstra) for EFTPOS.

One of these systems can support about 50 EFTPOS terminals given the small data packets sent (all 3DES) for each transaction.

Our EFTPOS terminals have one backup dial-up (in each site) in case the ISDN (or WAN links to it) goes down.

Tell me, *WHAT* happens when the _original_ is needed for forensic analysis to establish/rebut a "quality" forgery or other 'alteration' of the original?

_WHO_ bears the liability for having honored the forged/altered instrument?

_HOW_ do you prosecute a criminal forgery case without the actual evidence?

Or, maybe the issue is moot, because nobody forges checks any more? <*guffaw*>

Under Check 21, the scanned image *is* the original instrument for all legal purposes. If the forensic information you desire isn't captured by the scan, you're out of luck.

If you say "I never wrote that check," and the bank presents you with a fax-quality monochrome printout of the check, under the law they have presented you with as much proof as if they had presented the original check.

I don't like this part myself, but it's the law now in the U.S., and good luck fighting the banking lobbyists to get it changed....

You may have an easier time of it using electronic banking or payment by credit/debit card. The chargeback rules for those procedures are usually more liberal than those for paper checks.

My credit union has ATMs that work this way, although I'm not sure the check is actually shredded within the ATM. The check is accepted via slot-feed and scanned. The scanned image is displayed on the ATM's screen, and also printed on the customer's receipt.

The first time I used this feature, I had an interesting problem due to the bizarre way the ATM handles PIN verification.

When the card is entered, it is read and spit back out. Then it asks for the PIN. So there is no longer an opportunity for the ATM to eat the card if the customer enters the wrong PIN too many times.

And apparently the PIN is not verified immediately when entered. It waits until the first transaction.

So I fed in my card, it spit it back out and asked for my PIN. I entered 4 digits. Then it asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to deposit a check. So it activated the slot feeder, I fed in the check, and it scanned it.

Then it told me my PIN was wrong.

Since I wasn't sure whether I had remembered the wrong number, or fat-fingered the correct one, I screwed up 2 more times.

Then it told me I had exhausted my PIN retries and it was cancelling the transaction.

But it didn't give back my check, which was somewhere deep within the bowels of the machine, maybe shredded or maybe not. So there I was with no check and no funds deposited to my account.

When I called the next day, they were able to get it straightened out.

+--------------- | Rob Levandowski snipped-for-privacy@macwhiz.com wrote: | > Several banks have even been working with ATM vendors on creating ATMs | > that will accept checks through a slot-feed mechanism, without an | > envelope. The ATM would scan the check as it was inserted and convert | > it to an ACH draft, and shred the check within the ATM after the | > customer verifies the scanned information. | | My credit union has ATMs that work this way, although I'm not sure the | check is actually shredded within the ATM. The check is accepted via | slot-feed and scanned. The scanned image is displayed on the ATM's | screen, and also printed on the customer's receipt. +---------------

Bank of America has been rolling those out in the SF Bay Area for some months now. Most (though not yet all) of the BofA ATMs I go to now use this no-deposit-slip/no-envelope/scan-checks method.

-Rob

----- Rob Warnock snipped-for-privacy@rpw3.org

627 26th Avenue <URL:

San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607