First, condolences to the family. However, this seems like an overreaction to me. Any bank is going to be concerned when a party wants to cash $100,000 in checks. Aren’t credit unions or S&L’s more on the line to their members should the checks turn out to be bogus? They claim the bank could have verified the funds with a phone call but who to call and how may not have been that clear. How many of us can get through to the necessary party in the government at the spur of the moment?
As another poster pointed out, all they had to do is deposit the checks and then notify the funeral home and they doubtless would have been able to provide whatever kind of funeral they wanted. It sounds like they got the funeral but are just angry at the delay in getting the funds.
I fully understand the frustration and the effect of grief but they are jumping on the litigation bandwagon way too fast and trashing a credit union whose rules were in place long before this incident. Please, let this not be another Cindy Sheehan in the making.
The bank is being an a—. It could have cleared say 10,000 from one check to handle the expenses.
It’s very easy to find out if a check is “good”. You call the issuing bank, ask to “verify funds”, then give them the checking acct number. In this case, I would assume it’s the treasury dept. A few minutes with our good friend google would have made this much easier on the family.
I say this as a person who “verifies funds” a lot, and as a bank customer who wanted cash for a very large check, drawn on the same bank. They “didn’t think they could do it...it’s very irregular”.. So, I told them I’d be happy to sit in their lobby and chat it up with the other bank customers, and voila! 10 minutes later, I walked out of there with my cash.
Banks need to remember that the money they hold is not their own personal fortune, it belongs to the depositors!