littleFred wrote:"Yes" to all those. The bank number is six digits, formatted like "12-34-56".notorial dissent wrote:Does England not have a central clearing house for checks and financial transactions, and is not each bank assigned a separate unique id that goes on their checks along with the actual account number of the issuer?
The video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrKwhPXtK1E at 1m39s has a reasonable image of a cheque. The bank number (top-right) looks like "00-00-00", which I suppose isn't a valid bank number. But this might be a specimen cheque.
I can't read the address of the "WeRe Bank" top-left, but it may be the Manchester address I quoted above.
Does the clearing house ensure the bank really exists? I don't know. In theory, they merely pass on all the cheques each day to the correct banks. The bank itself (such as WeRe) either accepts the cheque (and sends money accordingly) or dishonours it. Peter of England may be quite wealthy, and able to pay out tens of thousands of pounds as seed money for a scam. I have no inside-knowledge of banking procedures, so I don't know if this would work, or for how long, or what offences might be committed. Perhaps someone with inside knowledge could pull it off, for a while.
Banks seem to be regulated by the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Banking Act 2009, and probably many others. But to Peter of England, regulations like car insurance are ignored.
He doesn't say what eventually happens to the promissory notes. (The video says £100,000 but the more recent PDF has £150,000.) A sucker would only get value if they bought a house or something. But I expect Peter would put a limit on the amounts for cheques: monthly mortgage payments are okay, but paying off a mortgage isn't.
Sure, it may all be kosher. Peter may be a secret billionaire who is happy to pay off the debts of loads of people. But then he wouldn't need the promissory notes.
Nope, I'm afraid something is very rotten with this scheme.
I'm replying to this having not read the entire thread, so it may have been explained earlier, but the process is:
In the UK, when you deposit a check the bank you deposit it into at the end of the day sorts out all the checks they have accepted and send an electronic notice to the issuing bank. The issuing bank will the next day transfer funds for all the checks written on its accounts the previous day to the banks to which they were deposited. This is a conditional payment, it depends upon verification that the check is genuine, not stolen or such. The WeRe checks would bounce at this point if the bank code at the top was not a genuine bank, as the bank that took in the check would do their daily sort and have check they couldn't find bank matching the code, because the bank does not exist. The code is assigned by the BofE, and a lot of verification happens before one is issued.
The physical check is sent to the bank it is issued from, and their accounts verification department looks at the check, verifies it is genuine and they transfer their money to the receiving bank who then credits the account of the depositor, the issuing bank at the same time debits the account on which the check was written. Their is a 5 day rule, meaning, if you deposit a check and it turns out to be no good, your bank has 5 days to remove the money back from your account, if they don't catch it in 5 days, they have to absorb the loss, BUT this rule is not applied in cases of fraud or stolen checks. For that they get 10 days after the statement period of the bank, this allows a customer to look at his statement and say "I didn't write a check for that amount to that person, this is a stolen or forged check"
The big difference between the UK and the US is that in the UK, the banks works amongst themselves to sort it all out and send parcels containing the checks back and forth to each other every day, and settle up amongst themselves every day. In the USA, most (not all, some banks still don't participate but its rare) checks are cleared by the local branches of the Federal Reserve Banks, who take in the physical check, make an electronic image of it, store it themselves for a period before returning it to the issuing bank and do all the accounting and settling up between the different banks for them, each member bank gets a daily report and credit/debit of their account at the Federal Reserve Bank. The banks do not for the most part communicate amongst themselves, they deal with the Federal Reserve Clearing System. The US banking system is an order of magnitude larger than the UK and the sheer size of the USA compared to England is, well, its a lot bigger and more complicated to send the actual checks back and forth here than over there.
Anyhow, if WeRe is taking member funds into a real bank and using that money to cover the checks they issue, it'll last as long as the Ponzi scheme it is holds out, if he's just majiking up his accounts, even in England the banks will figure it out in a day or two.
