3141
Established Member
Up to the 70s as you say, and I can't remember when they stopped returning them with your statements.In the 70s at least, it was an option to have paid cheques automatically returned with statements, and indeed I did.
They had stamps showing that they had been processed. Those which I had written for cash in Europe (which was mainstream then - using guarantee card) had impressive quantities of such stamps!
When I was working in Zambia in 1969-72 many people obtained single lens reflex (SLR) cameras from shops in Aden or Hong Kong, where they were much cheaper than in Britain even after being transported to Zambia and paying Zambian import duty. I ordered a Minolta SRT101 from a store in Hong Kong, paying with a cheque drawn on my Barclays account in London. After several weeks nothing had arrived, and I wrote to the store to ask what was happening. They answered that they had no trace of my order. I contacted my bank to ask them to stop the cheque. They replied that it had been debited against my account, and they had just posted it along with my most recent statement. As they had used surface mail it took about three months to reach me. When it arrived I saw that it had been altered most brilliantly so that some individual could cash it. It had gone through several other banks on its way from Hong Kong to Barclays, with all their stamps as you've said above, and no-one had spotted the forgery. I returned it to Barclays with a letter pointing out the alterations that had been made, and eventually got my money back.