A woman calls about renting the fellowship hall for her niece’s wedding reception in October. She’s pleasant, organized, and slightly apologetic about being out of state. She asks good questions about parking.
The rental fee is $600. The check arrives four days later, made out to the church, for $3,850.
She’s mortified when she calls. Her event coordinator handles the deposits for the caterer and the rental company and put the whole thing on one check by mistake. Would the church mind depositing it and sending the difference — $3,250 — on to the coordinator? She’ll text the details. The wedding is in nine weeks and the caterer wants the deposit by Friday.
The treasurer deposits the check on Monday. It clears. On Wednesday, she wires $3,250 to the coordinator.
Seventeen days later the bank calls. The check was counterfeit. The $3,850 is being pulled back out of the church’s account, and the $3,250 is gone.
The one thing to understand about checks
Everything in this article follows from a single fact that almost nobody has been told plainly:
A check clearing does not mean the check is good.
Those feel like the same sentence. They are not.
When you deposit a check, federal law requires your bank to make the money available to you quickly — generally within a day or two for most deposits. That’s a consumer-protection rule, and it exists for good reasons: people shouldn’t wait two weeks to spend their own paycheck. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency puts it directly: “funds may become available to you before the bank has been able to verify the check.”
Verification is a separate, slower process. The check has to travel back through the system to the bank it was drawn on, and that bank decides whether it’s real. Forgeries, counterfeits, and checks drawn on closed accounts can be discovered weeks after the money appeared in your account. The FTC’s summary: “Fake checks can take weeks to be discovered and untangled.”
When the forgery surfaces, the money comes back out of your account. Not the scammer’s — yours. The FTC again: “the scammer has any money you sent, and you’re stuck paying the money back to the bank.”
Cashier’s checks are not an exception, despite their reputation. The OCC states it explicitly, answering that exact question: “If the check is fraudulent, the bank may charge it back against your account (in other words, deduct the funds from your account) or obtain a refund from you.”
So when your treasurer says “it cleared,” what she means is “the bank has let us spend it.” She has not learned anything at all about whether it’s real. That gap — days of apparent certainty followed by weeks of actual risk — is the entire attack surface.
The rental deposit that’s too big
The scene above is the most common church-shaped version, and it comes in several outfits.
A wedding reception. A family reunion. A conference that needs the sanctuary for a Saturday. A film production wanting the building for two days. A group renting the gym for a season. What they share: an out-of-state contact, unusual smoothness about the price, and an overpayment with a reason attached.
The reason is always reasonable. An accounting error. A combined payment. A deposit from a third party who paid the wrong amount. Sometimes the overpayment is explained before the check arrives, which makes it feel disclosed rather than suspicious.
And the ask is always the same shape: deposit this, then send part of it somewhere else, soon.
That structure is the tell, independent of everything else. The money coming in is fake and slow to be discovered. The money going out is real and fast. The scam is nothing but the difference between those two speeds.
The benevolence applicant who needs it passed along
The version aimed at your compassion rather than your calendar.
Someone approaches the benevolence fund. Their story involves a check they’ve received but can’t cash — no bank account, an account frozen, a check made out to a name their bank won’t accept, a settlement or back-pay check from an employer. Could the church deposit it and give them the cash, or wire part of it to a landlord, a bus company, a relative, a hospital?
Sometimes there’s a variation in which the applicant has already been “helped” by someone else who sent them a check, and just needs the church to convert it.
Everything about the request is calibrated to make a policy feel cruel. The person is in genuine-sounding distress, the amount is modest, and refusing seems to punish someone for not having a bank account — which is a real hardship affecting real people.
But a church is not a check-cashing service, and there is no version of this that is safe. Not because the person in front of you is necessarily lying — occasionally they are also a victim, passed a fake check by someone else — but because the church absorbs the entire loss either way.
The compassionate answer is not “no.” It’s: we don’t cash or deposit checks for anyone, but let’s talk about what you actually need and what we can pay directly. Paying a landlord or a utility directly, from your account to theirs, helps the person more than cash does and cannot be used against you.
The donation with a request attached
The third version wears the most flattering costume.
A generous, unsolicited donation arrives from someone with no history with your organization — a large check, sometimes with a warm letter about your mission. Then a follow-up: the donor intended part of it for a partner ministry, a missionary, a scholarship recipient, a family they support, and would the church please forward that portion along?
Or: they’ve changed their mind about the amount and would like a partial refund.
Or, in the version that arrives with a fabricated story: a donor’s estate is disbursing funds and the church has been named, with a handling fee or a portion to be forwarded to another beneficiary.
Same structure, dressed in gratitude. Money in, part of it out, and a reason to hurry.
A genuine donor who wanted a partner ministry to receive money would send that money to the partner ministry.
The three rules that close all of it
You don’t need to evaluate stories. You need three rules that don’t require anyone to be a good judge of character.
One: never refund, forward, or disburse any portion of a payment until the originating bank confirms the check is good, in writing. Not “the funds are available.” Not “it cleared.” Written confirmation that the check is legitimate and final. Your bank can tell you how to request it, and how long it takes for that specific check. If a payer objects to waiting for that, you have your answer.
Give your staff the sentence so nobody has to invent it under pressure:
“Our policy is that we don’t return any part of an overpayment until our bank confirms the original check is final. That usually takes a few weeks. The simplest fix is to void this one and send a new check for the correct amount — happy to do that today.”
That offer is the perfect filter. A real customer is relieved. A fraudster will not accept it, because the correct amount is not the point.
Two: impose a mandatory waiting period on outgoing money that depends on incoming money. Thirty days is a reasonable default, and worth writing into your facility rental agreement so it’s disclosed up front rather than negotiated in the moment: overpayments are refunded thirty days after the funds are received. Legitimate renters do not care. The scam has a shelf life measured in days and cannot survive the wait.
Three: one person approves outgoing money, and it isn’t the person who took the call. Separating the relationship from the authorization is the oldest control in accounting and still the best. The person feeling the social pressure — the sympathy, the deadline, the mortified bride’s aunt — is not the person who signs. It is remarkably easy to say no to a request you did not personally receive.
Two smaller habits worth adding. Only accept checks made out to the organization, never to an individual on staff. And look at the check itself — a business check with no perforated edge, a mismatch between the bank named on the check and the routing information, a check drawn on a bank in a state unrelated to everyone involved, or an amount that seems oddly specific are all worth a second look. None of these are proof, and a good forgery passes all of them, which is why the rules above don’t depend on inspection.
If it already happened
Call your bank first, today. If the outgoing payment hasn’t settled, it may be stoppable. This is genuinely a matter of hours.
Report it to the FBI at ic3.gov, and use the phrase fake check scam along with the method the money left by. The Bureau’s Recovery Asset Team froze $507,042,623 across 3,574 domestic incidents in 2025, and that process works far better inside the first 24 to 72 hours than after.
Report it to the FTC and to your state attorney general’s office, which is how patterns become cases.
Then tell your board promptly and without spin. The instinct to quietly absorb a loss and mention it at the next quarterly meeting is understandable and always wrong. A treasurer who reports it the same day is doing the job correctly; the delay is what turns a loss into a governance problem.
And be clear inside the organization about who was at fault: the person who deposited the check followed a completely ordinary procedure and was told by their own bank that the money was there. That’s not carelessness. It’s a gap in how the banking system communicates, which is exactly why it needs a rule rather than better judgment.
What to do this week
Write one sentence and give it to whoever handles deposits and rentals:
We never send money back out of an overpayment, a donation, or a benevolence check until our bank confirms the original check is final — and refunds go out thirty days after the funds arrive, not before.
Then check two things. Does your facility rental agreement state the refund timing? If not, add the sentence. And is there one named person who approves outgoing payments over some threshold — $500, $1,000, whatever fits your size — who is not the person taking the booking? If not, name them at the next board meeting.
Thirty minutes, no budget, and this entire family of scams stops working on you.
Money controls are only one part of the picture. MissionDefend’s free assessment asks plain-English questions about how your organization handles money, email, member data, and accounts — including who can send funds out and under what conditions — then returns a baseline score and a ranked list of what to fix first.
No spam and no sales calls — just one email when it’s live.
Related reading
- the same counterfeit check, aimed at hopeful applicants
- how urgency after a storm moves benevolence money
- a single page of money rules your board can adopt
MissionDefend provides cybersecurity readiness assessments and educational guidance for churches and nonprofits. It is not a penetration test, a security audit, legal advice, or an incident response service.
Sources: Federal Trade Commission, How To Spot, Avoid, and Report Fake Check Scams; Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Aren’t cashier’s checks supposed to be honored immediately?; Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Bank Accounts: Funds Availability; FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report.