Non-Accountholder Deposits

Question: At one of your training sessions we had a discussion on people making deposits into accounts that did not belong to them. I have in my notes that "only people listed on the account can make a deposit - no friends, family members, etc." Is that what you said?

Answer: Not quite. You got some of it, but not all. What I said was that if someone tampered with an account without permission of the depositor, the bank could be in trouble. If someone went into your bank with a printed deposit ticket from your account, the bank could fairly safely assume you had approved that person making a deposit into your account. But if someone came in and wanted to make a deposit to your account and had neither deposit ticket or account number or permission from you, the bank should not give out the information, nor the deposit ticket without contacting you to see if it's OK to do transactions on your account. Particularly if the "deposit" the person wanted to make was a split, possibly of a fraudulent item.

On the other hand, if you have a person who for years has been making deposits in an account on which they are not a signer, and the customer has not objected to it, the transaction is ratified because there has been no objection to it in the past. It's a judgment call. Secretaries make deposits for bosses, wives for husbands, etc. But in most cases, they are in possession of printed deposit tickets obtained from the account holder. If someone needs an account number and a blank deposit ticket to make a transaction on an account, it should be a red flag transaction.

Copyright © 2005 Bankers' Hotline. Originally appeared in Bankers' Hotline, Vol. 14, No. 12, 1/05