I just sold my car, and the buyer paid with a bank cheque. Everyone knows bank cheques are good, right?
Well it suddenly occured to me that even though I've received and issued bank cheques before, that I had no idea how to verify their authenticity when receiving one. So when I banked it, I asked the clerk some questions, and found out some interesting info.
Apparently there are a lot of people who are 'washing' bank cheques. This involves stealing them from the post, lifting the ink, and printing over them.
My bank doesn't automatically clear bank cheques anymore. Any bank cheque issued from another bank will take just as long to clear as an ordinary cheque. If the cheque was issued by the same bank as yours, then they can check the serial number to verify the amount, and make sure there aren't any stops on it - in this case, it clears instantly. I'm assuming this means you can call the bank up anytime and quote them the serial number on the cheque and have them verify this.
So if you're being paid out of hours, I guess there's no easy way to know that your cheque is legit. There are common sense things you can do, like checking for the watermark, and making sure the issuing date is recent (ie, when your buyer said they'd be going to the bank, instead of 2 weeks ago), other than that you'd be relying on being able to verify the serial number through the issuing bank. This should be fine if it also happens to be your bank, but I get the feeling that if you rang up and weren't a customer of the issuing bank then things might get a bit trickier.
(Oh, and yes, the buyers cheque was fine)