Postal Money order to pay bill stolen. Any advice?

Yep--find out who signed for it and where it was cashed!

I'd be looking at the delivery receipt for where and who signed for it.

I have purchased a very limited number of money orders, but those I have purchased have always had an area to write who the payee is. Did your family member not make the money order out to the hospital?

I think you are jumping to a lot of conclusions here.

A money order has to be made out to someone. Who did she make it out to? And how do you know this "Nigerian last name" isn't an employee of the hospital's business office? A business like a hospital can't sign it, a person has to sign it. Have you tried to find out if this person who signed it is in fact not employed by the hospital?

If she doesn't have a checking account for what ever reason, perhaps in the future she can pay you the cash and you can send a check so the hospital can deposit the check without having to go th rough the process of cashing it out first.


eta: I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that all is proper and in order. Only the office for billing is ahead of the office for receiving. So receiving hasn't posted the money had arrived before billing sent out a second notice.  Your relative needs to be using a payment method she is more familiar with the way it works and you need to stop assuming someone with a last name other than Smith and Jones is a Nigerian mail fraud.

While it is possible there is someone authorized to sign paper payments for deposits, I think it's far more likely that an entity receiving multiple payments on a daily basis actually has a set of deposit stamps.  They typically say something like For Deposit Only/Memorial Hospital SC/Acct #123456789.  I would be suspicious, too, if there were a name signed to the back of the check I sent to the hospital.

THIS IS NOT A CHECK. The rules of how to use a check DO NOT APPLY to a money order. The person who presents is is receiving cash.  I can tell who has never tried to use a money order to pay a business.....

I do now know scrapscentsy is a racist. See a name she determines is Nigerian and calls the cops instead of calling the hospital's billing department.

voltagain

You can most certainly make out money orders to businesses, and a business will deposit them into their account just like a check (because the bank will verify that the MO is good before releasing the cash into the business checking account).

I hope the OP comes back with more info on what transpired between them finding out it had not been paid and calling the police.


voltagain, you need to slow your roll on calling someone a racist geez.

 I worked at a bank for many years and money orders were processed with exactly the same process/equipment as regular bank checks or cashier's checks. People would come in with them, deposit them, and the funds would be deposited in their account just like a check. Oftentimes people would think that a money order was a safer way to handle a sales transaction because it was basically supposed to be guaranteed funds, but since criminals have gotten more creative over the years that is no longer the case. We were trained to look for specific things with money orders, like amounts that had been altered, payees that had been bleached out and re-written, etc. to determine if a money order was legitimate or not and the funds held until it clears just like a check.

Also money orders can be stamped with a "pay to the order of / for deposit only" business stamp. I had an out of state customer that would order stuff from me all the time and she would always pay with postal money orders. I stamped them on the back with my business bank stamp and ran them through my account just like any other check. They don't need a personal signature at all.

The only kind of checks that DID have to be signed with real signatures were those issued by insurance companies, typically for a claim. Those did have to be signed by the person regardless of whether the check was being deposited or cashed. We couldn't stamp those and they would get kicked back if someone tried.

scentcrazy here is the info directly from the USPS website:

I don't understand why the P.O. would tell her the name of the person who cashed it was 'Nigerian'? Has she spoken to the hospital to see id this person works there?

In a previous job, I worked for a Nigerian clergyman and therefore with many individuals whose heritage is Nigerian, so I became familiar with some of the names of Nigerian people. Some surnames are strongly associated with some ethnic/linguistic groups in Nigeria and you would probably not have that surname if your heritage was not Nigerian. To someone with more knowledge still, your name can tell someone what region and tribe you come from. This part at least is not particularly problematic. You can't always, but you can often look at someone's name and understand something about their heritage. So that is the answer to that particular question and I think you can go easy there.

That said, I have never personally signed business checks/MOs for deposit. We use a stamp or hand sign, in which case it is my name for business name and is still not cashed or deposited by me personally but by me on behalf of the business. If I had sent a large payment in any form to a business and it was cashed by an individual and not shown applied to my account, I would probably conclude that something improper had occurred. In that case the person's last name is irrelevant, but I would probably still think in the direction of contacting law enforcement and not assume that the bank departments are out of sync, especially if the intended recipient has no record of receiving payment anywhere.

Good Lord, I think you need a break. You're wrong about money orders and no, no one in the hospital is signing their own personal last name on a payment to the hospital. Unless it's a ten-man outfit using 1950s era processing, which I guess is maybe possible, but highly highly unlikely.

Seeing a last name on a money order made out to the hospital would be very concerning to me, too, and ESPECIALLY if it's Nigerian because, unfortunately, that country is very well known for its scammers.

Nor is it racist to be able to spot certain last names as ones that are Nigerian. I'm pretty sure she would have called if Mary Smith had signed, because Mary Smith is not the hospital. Is it out of line to guess that Tran Nguyen is Vietnamese? HwaCha Kim is Korean? Certain ethnicities/nationalities are associated with certain names and it doesn't make you a racist to be able to determine that.