What Happens If You Deposit a Spouse’s Cheque in Your Tangerine Account By Mistake?

My husband and I have some shares in a company we worked for that pays dividends. Despite the fact that I enrolled my shares online at Computershare, I still haven’t switched to having the dividend electronically deposited into my bank account. What happened recently may make me hurry up and change that. Anyway, we received two paper cheques and I went to deposit them into our respective Tangerine accounts by using an iPad to take a photo of the cheque and sent it in. I only made one mistake: I sent the photo of MY unendorsed cheque to be deposited into my husband’s chequing account: then I was left wondering, what would happen?

Will Tangerine Reject a Cheque Sent by Photo Deposit that is Not Payable to the Account Holder?

If I had tried to deposit the cheque into a joint account, I would not have had any worries. However, I had tried to deposit the cheque, which was not signed on the back, nor made payable by writing on it in some way, into an account that is solely my husband’s.

He received the standard Tangerine email stating they had received the images of the cheque.

Then we started waiting to see what, if anything would happen. After a couple of business days, he received a second email from Tangerine.

The Not Very Reassuring Result

They accepted it!

Tangerine cashed and cleared the cheque without questioning why it was not payable to my husband. Admittedly, our last name and address are the same but even so, it technically should not have been accepted.

Because I made the mistake and have no urge to complicate matters, I won’t be demanding Tangerine reverse the payment. It would be interesting to see, though, how complicated it is if we needed to reverse the payment.

The Two Morals of the Story

Don’t deposit a cheque without engaging your brain first to make sure you are putting the correct cheque into the correct account.

Don’t expect a bank to automatically reject a cheque being deposited into the incorrect account.

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Have you ever had one of these “I really should have had my coffee first” moments when depositing a cheque? Did it all turn out well in the end? Please share your experience with a comment.

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