I Receive Check From an Online Friend, Am I Gonna Be Alright?
Suppose at the time being you are awaiting the arrival of or even have received a check from a friend you met online, to preserve your security against nigerian scam, you have to really take these into consderations:
Scammers get your data either by getting close personaly to you or by intruding your privacy with a spyware.
Scammers send to victims checks that are either one hundred percent counterfeit, or made of stolen check books.
Possessing a fake check only can be enough to make you being charged with felony even if you are a victim in the chain.
It may be considered a felony too to trade a fraud check for money or to deposit it in an account.
Although Federal felony charges are rare, the law is already there for such prosecution. A felony can be charged upon you both on a State and a Federal level.
What should be put in mind is that the system is not letting it go away. On the contrary, justice is blindly upheld, as it should be, and despite the fact that they are victims, fraudulent checks are prosecuted against them.
The consequence of cashing a forged check is not only a criminal prosecution, but there also are other consequences you should consider. They financially classify as catastrophe.
When you deposit a check into your account, once the bank’s hold on the check expires, it then advances their own money to you. Although your bank may state that the bank’s hold is equal with the check clearance process, it actually is not equal. A check can take from days to months to clear. You are obliged to pay the check balance back to the bank when they clears it and finds out it is fraudulent.
What your bank can do is not only to demand collection remedies against you, but also incur a judgment against you for the amount of money owed, and (depending on where you live), withhold your wages and revenues from your bank accounts.
Nevertheless, banks will most likely not settle with fairly low installment. For example, a bank will not settle with a $200 monthly installments for $100,000.
What you should keep in mind also is that your credit can be badly affected by the collection activities. Lower credit score will make it hard for you to get loans with low interest rates, and you can be prohibited from obtaining a mortgage.
You may have a difficult time explaining how you came in the possession of that money to the IRS officer auditing your tax return, when he inquires about the origin of a large deposit in your account. The officer is unlikely to believe your story, and you would face further penalties and fines for not stating the revenue from the check as income.
This concludes one thing: Cashing a check you received from someone on the internet is very risky and can be damaging to your life literally.