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Home >> Checks/Money Orders >> Checks You Wrote
Scammed by Door to Door Salesman
A sales guy selling products door to door wanted us to use a credit card check to pay for the product. He said we can make the check out to his name, but I wrote it to the company name: Kirby. We had the right to cancel the purchase in three days, but we canceled the next day before the bank opened. He cashed the check for $2369.51 at his bank. He then came by and took back his product and left. It took us four days to find out that the hold on the check did not work, and now he has our money and we don't have a product or our money. He told us that we will not get our money because he is claiming bankcruptcy. The check was cashed and endorsed only with his name on the back. I thought it would go to Kirby and listed as Kirby only. Is this wrong?
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 Door-to-door sales have a deserved reputation for being extremely risky. It is one thing to buy candy from the kid down the block who's raising money for a school activities fund; it's an entirely different thing to buy a product you don't know from a salesman you don't know, representing a company you've never heard of.
Canceling the order didn't stop the payment of the check, because the salesman wasn't honest. Because the name Kirby is associated with Kirby vacuum cleaners, a quick internet search showed that the company only sells through independent distributors (i.e., door-to-door), and that there are a lot of scam reports involving alleged sales of those vacuums. Its not likely that the individual who sold you the goods is planning to declare bankruptcy. It's likely that he said it to fend off the threat of action from you.
Contact your bank and ask them to reverse the posting of that check to your credit card account, due to the irregularity of the endorsement, which makes the check not properly payable. The fact that your bank did not identify the improper endorsement before paying the check should not be your problem. It is the bank's error for paying the check without the needed endorsement.
In the unlikely event that you can contact Kirby directly, you could ask the company if it would give you an affidavit that states it didn't receive the check or any benefit from it. That would enable your bank to file a warranty claim against the bank that cashed your check for the dishonest salesman. You should also contact the police.
Published on BankingQuestions.com 9/08/08
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