Winning a racial-discrimination lawsuit while black

Sauntore Thomas, an African-American man who lives in Detroit, had filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against a former employer and successfully won a substantial confidential settlement from the company. After receiving the checks from his attorney, Thomas decided to deposit the majority of the money and cash some of it at his local TCF bank branch, where he has had an account for nearly two years. He wanted to use the cash to buy a used car, since he didn't have a vehicle (Thomas is working-poor).

The bank told him they needed to make phone calls to verify the checks; but instead of doing so, the bank called the police and immediately reported the checks as fraudulent.

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About 3 p.m. Tuesday, Thomas entered the and filled out a sign-in sheet to meet with a banking specialist to open an additional savings account and deposit his checks. He eventually met with Assistant Branch Manager Erika Mack, gave her his checks and explained that he would like to open a savings account, deposit the checks and withdraw some cash. Mack immediately appeared suspicious, explained the checks would need to be “verified” but that the bank's computerized “verification system” was not working that day. Because of this malfunction, Mack said she would have to call in the checks to complete the transaction. She then walked away to a back area to "call in the checks," but before leaving, she asked Thomas: "How did you get this money?" Thomas answered the money was from a lawsuit settlement. After a few minutes, Mack returned and stated that the person who verifies checks “was not around.” Thomas said he'd wait until that person showed up. Turned out, the assistant bank manager was not going to-and-from a back area to complete Thomas' transaction, but rather had called the Livonia Police and reported that Thomas was trying to deposit fraudulent checks. Within 10 minutes, two Livonia Police officers arrived inside the lobby; two others remained outside the doors. One of the officers told Thomas that the bank had reported "a problem" with his checks, and wanted to know where he got them. Thomas explained the lawsuit, gave the officer his lawyer's business card, and then called his lawyer himself for help. Two officers spoke with Gordon, who also explained to the officers and an assistant bank manager that Thomas had settled a federal lawsuit involving race discrimination, and that he was trying to deposit his settlement checks. The bank still refused to deposit them, the lawsuit states, and then filed a police report against Thomas for check fraud.

The bank has given a slew of statements justifying their handling of Thomas's transaction. The one they spend the most time on is that there was something "wrong" with Thomas's behavior and that his requests were "very very unusual". Note the bank's description of the unusual requests:

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According to TCF's Wennerberg, Thomas presented three checks written from Enterprise that day: One for $59,000. One for $27,000. And one for $13,000. "They couldn't verify that those checks were due to a settlement," said Wennerberg, adding the bank contacted Enterprise to verify that the checks were part of a lawsuit, but were unable to do so. Wennerberg said the assistant manager who waited on Thomas was African American, and felt that something didn't "look right," so she called police. "Obviously, the customer got upset at that point," Wennerberg said, adding Thomas had made a "highly, highly unusual request." According to Wennerberg, Thomas wanted to deposit the two larger checks in his bank account, which, Wennerberg said, had only 52 cents in it. And he wanted to cash the $13,000 check, he said, adding the bank told him that those funds would be on hold for two business days, and that Thomas said "fine." Thomas also wanted a new debit card because, he told the bank, his old one wasn't working, he said, adding that request sounded unusual as well. Wennerberg said he had not yet seen the race discrimination lawsuit that Gordon filed against TCF on Wednesday, but denied that the bank engaged in discriminatory behavior. "We disagree with that," Wennerberg said. "We were looking at the behavior, the asks that he was making."

Evidently, cashing some of a lump sum and depositing the rest is suspicious. Asking for a replacement debit card because yours has stopped working is also "unusual".

The bank also makes two other contentions, although they are scattered through the story; firstly, they claim that an automatic check scanning machine revealed that the checks contained a "VOID" watermark - something which, to my knowledge, all modern checks contain. Meanwhile, in a statement the police detective assigned to the case said the bank told her that they considered the checks suspicious because they were different from that company's payroll checks, again claiming that this fact was automatically detected "by the system".

For Thomas's part, I think his attorney makes a very key point:

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"They could have just called the bank that issued the checks, and they apparently didn't do anything because it would have all been verified immediately."

Underscoring the plain simple truth of this, a disgusted Thomas finally stopped trying to argue his case at TCF and closed his account, taking his "suspicious" checks and walking a block down the street to a Chase bank, where he did not have an account. He opened an account there and deposited the checks completely without incident, and the checks cleared within 12 hours. Chase bank also has both automatic and behavior-based fraud-detection measures and none of them sensed anything unusual about the checks themselves or Thomas's "asks" regarding them (he got his cash, and bought the used vehicle he wanted).

TCF claims that Thomas's requests were "very very unusual", but the only thing that strikes me as unusual are the bank's procedures. For one thing, it was my impression that the standard procedure for verifying a check's authenticity - as Thomas's lawyer points out - is to call the issuing bank, not the account holder of the check, and then allow a certain period of time - anywhere from several hours to a couple of business days - for the verification to happen. TCF was clearly unwilling to do that, instead trying to call the company that wrote the check directly to "verify the money was from a settlement" and then reporting the check as fraudulent, to the police when they were unable to do so within 10 minutes! Why did the bank need to determine that the money was "from a settlement" before they would be able to cash it? All they should need to know is that the check itself is valid - which, again, is information that has to be obtained from the issuing bank, not the company that wrote it.

So, on the advice of his attorney, Thomas is suing the bank. She argues that the only thing "highly unusual" the bank really saw about Thomas's behavior was being a black man having possession of checks with lots of zeros on them.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/30LWle6