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Go to one of those instant cash places that give payday loans. You’ll pay a huge percentage in their fees. Chances are you will not have to divulge anymore than your name to cash it. The scammers that sent it to you already have that. Keep the envelope it was sent in to prove it was mailed to you and you never created it.

I talked with my banker a few days back, she said there are so many ways scammers are passing bad checks they have a hard time keeping their tellers educated on it.

When my mother moved in with me she closed an account held in her old bank. About 3 months later she got an envelope in the mail from California that was addressed in poorly written (as if by a child) scroll. It contained a printed check with my mother's name and old address as the account holder and was made out to an Hispanic name. It was marked insufficient funds. Clearly someone was trying to collect money that they were denied when the check did not clear. Mom then showed me statements she'd received from her closed account that listed about a dozen checks marked "denied due to lack of funds". The smallest check was $8,000 and the largest was $40,000.

I called the bank and they said don't worry, if there was no money in the account and no money paid out then she has nothing to worry about. The bank said people try to cash checks against closed accounts hoping to get cash from a teller before the system has time to recognize the error.

I complained that someone inside the bank had to be part of the scam and that it should be investigated. The bank said they didn't have a staff that did security and fraud investigations.

M&T.

I wrote out a check to a guy I hired to build a deck on my house. He did a good job for a fair price. I got the check back with a fingerprint on it. It made me ashamed that the bank would do that to him (because he was black?).