How many of you have a Cheque Guarantee card?

sutton111 · 16 October 2008 at 6:56PM

yes Laura ashley i know for certain as my mum paid by cheque on sunday for some wallpaper.

Extant · 16 October 2008 at 8:24PM

ShelfStacker wrote: »

I would imagine they might well be harder to get because unlike say a credit card or an overdraft, where there's a limit to how much debt the customer can get into (within reason), a cheque guarantee card's potential for bad debt is limited only by the number of cheques the customer has and how many they're willing to write. For instance, if you give a credit card to your new customer Mr Gary Gobulcoque, and he starts ordering multiple LCD TVs a day, his card can be blocked and/or declined before he can do much damage. Give a cheque card to him and the debt he can run up is roughly equal to the limit on the card multiplied by the number of cheques available to him - all it takes is a few dodgy cheque encashment services or shops that accept cheques and he's quids in.

So basically, it's because in the wrong hands, they could potentially be an absolute pain in the !!!!.

Dor what it's worth, might as well mention here, Waitrose are stopping taking cheques soon, found out the other week.

This is true. In 2004 I wrote off the grand sum of £19,984.30 to our branch recovery unit as a result of a £250 cheque guarantee card.

This was the best part of three cheque books, all written out for £250 cheques, and then associated costs as well. We did get it all back, but it still stands as the biggest sum of money I have ever signed away for the bank, and it's all because of cheques.

God I hate cheques.

ShelfStacker_3 · 16 October 2008 at 8:55PM

Thing is, there's no other real way to make payments to other people that you're meeting face to face quickly if you don't have cash on you. You can't use a debit card to pay them, can't use Internet or telephone banking to pay them (especially since there's no paper trail and there'd be no real proof that you paid them) but you can write out a cheque. They'll be around a whole lot longer until that particular problem is solved. Sadly.

WhySoHard_2 · 16 October 2008 at 9:20PM

BarclaysManager wrote: »

This is true. In 2004 I wrote off the grand sum of £19,984.30 to our branch recovery unit as a result of a £250 cheque guarantee card.

This was the best part of three cheque books, all written out for £250 cheques, and then associated costs as well. We did get it all back, but it still stands as the biggest sum of money I have ever signed away for the bank, and it's all because of cheques.

God I hate cheques.

How did you get the money back? And what went wrong in the first place? Did the customer fall into difficulties?

Extant · 16 October 2008 at 10:19PM

WhySoHard wrote: »

How did you get the money back? And what went wrong in the first place? Did the customer fall into difficulties?

Barclays have branch recovery units, which is basically collections. They're a team of people that sit around and work to get our money back - tracing "missing" people, dealing with any legal aspects, etc.

I'm not 100% sure how they managed to recover it all, but I imagine some of it must have been claimed back by stating the payee was a knowing party to fraud - I mean, I can't imagine you could find £19k+ of things to spend £250 on in such a short time. I'm guessing it was organized in some way.

[Deleted User] · 23 October 2008 at 8:25PM

My normal Lloyds card hasn't got cheque guarantee (they say I can have a £100 one if I like, but I can't be bothered), but my Premier account one has £250 guarantee on it.

LilacPixie · 23 October 2008 at 10:26PM

I have RBS - £100, Nationwide £100 and my Bank of scotland card doesn't have one because i specifically requested no cheque book.

I write maybe 2 cheques a year