Can I accept a cashiers check without risking being scammed?
Paying nearly $200 extra for the shipping would be one. But they’re paying $175 for a chair that (according to the OP) is “probably worth $300-400”. So paying extra for more convenient shipping isn’t quite as outrageous. I agree with the comments about building in as much time as possible between cashing the check and sending the chair (at least 7 business days, I’d say); if they balk at that, explain your reasoning, and if they still balk, tell them no chair for them.
According to Snopes, the additional risk you bear with a cashier’s check is this:The scam works because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) requires banks to make money from cashier’s, certified, or teller’s checks available in one to five days. Consequently, funds from checks that might not be good are often released into payees’ accounts long before the checks have been honored by their issuing banks. High quality forgeries can be bounced back and forth between banks for weeks before anyone catches on to their being worthless….Still, this doesn’t seem like the typical cashier’s-check scam described at that page. Forging a check will get them only the chair, not any cash. And if she really wanted to scam you out of a chair worth only a few hundred dollars, wouldn’t she prefer Greyhound pickup to UPS delivery, which would mean you’d have at least some sort of address to go on if the check turned out to be fake? Especi
