Patrick Combs is currently on tour with his one-man act, “Man 1, Bank 0,” in Edinburgh, Scotland. Fortunately, he’s able to laugh about that one time when he cashed a blatantly false check at his local bank branch.
“It was a cheque, made out in my name, for $95,093.35 and it came in a junk-mail letter from a get-rich-quick company. It was worthless, meant only as a financial tease, a lip-licking come-on,” Combs writes in a retelling for the Financial Times. “What it was never meant for was deposit.”
But deposit the check he did. And to his surprise, the bank credited Combs’ account for the check’s full value. Combs waited three weeks before withdrawing a cashier’s check for the full amount, then waited some more — until finally, the bank reacted, rescinding Combs’ ATM card and locking him from his account.
What happens from there makes up the bulk of Combs’ comedy act, which ran off-Broadway in New York for a month before being taken to Ireland. And, not surprisingly, Combs doesn’t reveal the punch line in his story for the FT; instead, he says that, “At the end of the show, I reveal what, in an attempt to teach my bank a lesson in customer service, I did with the $95,000.”
Checks are already losing in popularity. In 2011, consumers used $75 billion less in cash and checks combined, replacing those purchases with debit card transactions, according to MasterCard. And the switchover was even larger in the two years prior, MasterCard says. One would think stories like these will only contribute further to the move from checks to plastic.
