After being deluged this morning with news about the changes coming Thursday to U.S. check cashing laws, I did a little bit of surfing around to see what I should know. Pretty much every single resource I found said that the most important thing that consumers should understand about the changes is that you should assume that the physical, actual check that you write completely ceases to exist at the moment that it is cashed. (This is because banks will now scan checks at the point of deposit, and then process them entirely from the information in the scan.) And this means that if a bank makes a mistake processing a check — say, they cash a $100 check for $1,000 instead — it will be somewhat harder for the person who wrote the check to prove that an error occurred. The new law anticipated this, and has a remedy: substitute checks. These are images of your checks which adhere to specific standards, and carry the same legal weight as the original check; the kicker is that many of those little images of your checks that you get with your statements don’t meet the standards of substitute checks, so you need to make sure that you specifically request “substitute checks” from your bank.

This is all confusing enough that, not surprisingly, I called my bank tonight to ask that all my statements contain the substitute checks and the representative had no clue what I was talking about. She put me on hold for about five minutes, and then came back to tell me that her supervisor said all accounts will have them on the statements, but I was less than reassured. I’ll make a mental note to call back in a few days, and see if the relevant information has filtered down.