Customer walks in. She's somewhat of a regular, and one of our well-tenured established tellers is usually the one to help her. Today, I'm the one helping her, and I'm fairly new- I've never seen her before, and she's never seen me before either.

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She presents with three checks to deposit into the account. Her account is well established, and the system will not trigger a hold for the amount of her checks. It should be a simple in and out, check deposit, here's your receipt, have a great day. This is what she's expecting and what she's gone through every single time she's been in for months. She's fairly tired, too- I tried making small talk, building rapport, looking for any cross-sell opportunities to meander towards in conversation... But the customer is tired and uninterested, and that's totally OK. Let me just deposit these checks...

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There's just one, little problem... You see... The checks she's presenting? They have every, and I mean EVERY, characteristic of a fraudulent check right there in front of me. Some of the security features seem to be missing. Crow's feet galore. Different fonts all over the place. The signature looks crudely photoshopped and half of it is cut off. Massive boxes around the number amounts.

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Now, do I think these are fraudulent checks? Most likely not... But as a new employee, if I just take these in without getting a supervisor to sign off on them, I'll get in trouble. So, what do I do?

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*Studies checks for a much longer time than the customer is used to* "ma'am, unfortunately it looks like these checks are displaying a lot of fraudulent characteristics... I'm going to have to use a look back program to grab an image of the last set of checks you deposited a month ago and see if they match"

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Now, this process takes upwards of 5 minutes. The customer is shocked and slightly upset because she's literally never had this issue before. I made a bit of small talk when she walked in, tried to build some rapport, and because she was tired and in a hurry she didn't really answer much. Now, she feels like I'm causing issues for her or penalizing her because she shut me down. This is ABSOLUTELY not what I'm doing, I'm trying to get her out of here as fast as possible while also C'ing my A. The other issue is I HAVE to get the results of this lookback BEFORE hitting up a supervisor, otherwise again I'll get talked to about "gathering all relevant information" before asking for help.

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Now, in this case I was very lucky. Customer didn't really take it personally, did not get angry or upset, and her regular teller JUST happened to come back from lunch as I was trying to pull up the old checks. I asked him if he could sign off on all the checks and he did, I deposited them, case closed.

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To any new employees out there, would you have done anything differently? I ask this because in my scenario, I totally understand and emphasize with the customer's anger.