My son stole checks from us ( Wells Fargo Checking Account ) and cashed them into his Wells Fargo Checking account. The checks were NOT SIGNED and the " To '' Field was NOT FILLED OUT. He deposited them at an Wells Fargo ATM. A total of XXXX checks for a total amount of {$4600.00} over a period of over a months were cashed. Wells Fargo did not flag or return any of these checks despite the obvious deficiencies ( see attached file for a copy of the checks ). When I talked to Wells Fargo about this, they said that the ATM is just a machine and can not verify checks, that there are too many checks cashed every day at ATM 's for Wells Fargo to verify them and that it is up to the account owner to catch any deficiencies. We also field a fraud claim with Wells Fargo, which was denied based on the fact that we are signers on both accounts ( our and as parents on the teen checking account ). 
I understand that my son 's action are my responsibility and I agree with the reasoning for denying the fraud claim - after all, if the bank tried to recover the money from him, it would have to come from us since he does n't have any ... However, I have a serious issue with a bank shrugging off the responsibility for reviewing checks. If they chose to delegate check acceptance to a machine ( ATM ), they need to put the same controls in place that they have at the counter. No teller would have accepted a check without a signature, a check without a " to '' field, a check without a date or a check where the number and word amount does not match - yet for an ATM to accept them and no-one reviewing them afterwards is supposed to be acceptable? Our son tried writing several small checks first and when they went through the system without raising any flags, he followed with more and bigger checks. If the bank had caught the clearly incomplete checks within 5-10 business days, we would have been alerted and could have stopped it right then. This would have limited our losses to {$750.00} and would have meant a misdemeanor charge for our son. Because the bank continued to honor these checks with no review whatsoever, he continued to write them and our losses went up to {$4600.00} before we caught it on our bank statement and our son now faces felony charges. 
