Originally Posted by miadeals

Ok, people need to calm down a little. There are plenty of people that may deserve the blame besides the tellers.

Let me explain how a check (or money order) is processed: Your bank tallies up all the checks it has at the end of each day, and sends boxes of checks to the federal reserve (or other large bank that processes checks) who then sorts them and sends them by plane overnight all over the nation to the closest other federal reserve branch, who sorts them down to local banks, and then has the local banks come pick up those checks, who then sort them and debit them from their account holders.

(Remember - a money order is just a check.)

So, at ANY POINT in this any check can get lost, damaged, or "dropped twice." "Dropped twice" means that at some point somewhere a check gets lost for some reason - a machine gets jammed, someone loses it in a drawer or on the floor or in a bag or behind a machine or a billion other places. What happens when a check goes missing? The bank that is supposed to have it will contact the bank that supposedly sent it to them, and each bank will go back to their source, until they get to YOUR bank where you deposited it. Then your bank will look in their records and produce a "photo copy" of the check and redeposit it for credit (they are supposed to "film" every check you deposit with the teller so they can produce a copy later - so if they have a photocopy, yours went past the "teller" phase). Well, say in the meantime the original check somehow made its way to through the system all the way to the issuing bank (say, someone found it and stuffed it in a box) - now, when the photocopy comes through, they see the "same check" twice. So, now the copy is returned "refer to maker."

(Or the original never makes it - gets totally lost - but the new photocopy that was requested does, but its a crappy unreadable copy, and they return that. Which is what it sounds like happened here.)

Basically, now the banks will go behind the scenes and track down where the original check came from, and the photocopy, and debit any bank that wasn't supposed to get credit for the original check. Eventually they'll all figure it out and you will get your credit. (Or get your bank to make a real copy from their film records and deposit that.)

Again, dozens of people could handle a check before it gets back to the drawn-on bank. So its not necessarily your teller. You'll probably never know who screwed up. And who do you think tallies up the ATM checks? A teller. So its not like an ATM is saving anyone here from any of these screwups.

PS. I used to work at the fed and we screwed up a lot. As do all banks. Its a total mess, you have no idea.