A customer brought in a cashiers check for $7,000. He had sold a car over the Internet. The sales price of the car was $4,000. Starting to sound familiar?

Anyway - the check is counterfeit, customer was on the up and up (did not deposit the check), do we need to file a SAR? While doing a search for this answer I saw a post Ken made

Quote:

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*SAR filing requirements are determined by the dollar thresholds. Since you do not appear to have a suspect, the threshold for mandatory filing is $25,000.

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Do we have a suspect?

I would say that if your customer can identify the party that sent the check, then you have a suspect. More than likely, what your customer has is a fraudulent I.D. At this point, it may be your call about filing a SAR, if your customer has an e-mail address, purported name and address, you could include it in your SAR, but I would preface that information by saying you have no way to verify the identity of the suspect.

I agree that this falls into the 'unable to identify a suspect' category.

Since the bank hasn't lost any money no SAR required. Your customer didn't try to defraud you. But he was defrauded. I would advise him to go see local police or the prosecutor., If the check orginated elsewhere they likely won't do anything except maybe do a local news story warning others of this scheme that I'm amazed is still going on.

JacFSB wrote: "a loss by the bank is not a prerequesite to filing a SAR."

I agree. I mis-spoke. I should have said since there was no attempt by the customer to defraud the bank no SAR is required. I read the post to say the customer came to the bank to see if it was a legitimate check or upon discovery it was a forgery was forthright with the bank. The bank was not the target so no SAR required.

Steve, I concur. Otherwise, we would be filing SARs everytime one of our customers deposited a bad check.

I agree with Bonnie. After a recent thrashing by federal regulators on how we decided to file SAR's, we have decided to err on the side of caution. Since the seller would have some information, I would include in the narrative that the suspect info had not been verified.

Erroring on the side of caution is fine when there is a grey area. I see no grey area here and would be willing to defend my opinion to any examiner.

In my opinion the SAR would be a waste of time for the bank and FinCEN. FinCEN loads it into their database. A copy of it goes out to the FBI office where the bank is located. The FBI calls the bank and asks, "What's the bank's loss?" Answer: Nothing. "Was the bank the target of the fraud?" Answer: No. "Then who had the potential loss?" Answer: Our customer. "That would be a local jurisdiction issue then. Our file is closed."

I disagree that the Bank is not a target for the loss. There are a number of banks that have suffered losses because of these counterfeit items. The fraudster is out to defraud anyone who processes the item whether its the original victim or his/her bank.

I have a couple of comments. First, the filing limits ($0 for employees, $5,000 for known suspects and $25,000 without a known suspect) are ceilings, not floors. You can file the SAR for any amount. Since 9/11, many regulators and FinCEN have been trying to make this point. Hitting the ceiling is when the filing becomes mandatory rather than discretionary.

Second, since you are under the mandatory filing limit, the choice is yours. Your decision should be based, I think, on the nature of your "suspiciou" and whether filing would help law enforcement. Petty scams may not be worth filling out the SAR, but if you believe that the activity could be part of a larger activity, that is when the SAR becomes useful in the data base.