When a Utah author found an uncashed check years after it expired, he asked if it could be reissued. He was told no — it had been cashed. So he decided to Get Gephardt.
Amazon initially refused to reissue the $110.53 check. LAYTON — Long before streaming, downloading or even saving your video game became a thing, there were cartridges.
Avid collector Michael Richardson knows those classic cartridges — Atari, Intellivision, ColecoVision — you name it. He's collected so many cartridges and kept so many notes that he parlayed his passion into a book titled "Collecting Cartridges.
" He sells it through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. And while it has never topped sales charts, every so often, Richardson gets a royalty check for "Collecting Cartridges.
"One check, made out for $110.53, got set aside, never cashed, never even taken out of its envelope. But replacing the check part? That's where it got weird. Richardson said Amazon first told him they'd look into it.
Then they told him his $110 check did not meet the $100 threshold. Then, he was told that they cut him a new check.
Then they told him that they're not going to send him a check. And then he was told the original check had been cashed. But Amazon then told him his case was closed. So, he asked me to investigate.
"I never did cash it," he insisted. "It was sitting on a desk, totally sealed in the envelope for a year or two. "In Utah, the company that issued that check just doesn't get to hold onto that money forever. Utah's Uniform Unclaimed Property Act requires businesses to turn over funds from uncashed checks to the state after a dormancy period of three years so the rightful owner can claim it from the state's Unclaimed Property Division.
The process is called escheatment. For instance, wages, commissions, bonuses or other compensation for personal services have a one-year dormancy period in Utah. I reached out to Amazon on Richardson's behalf, not through customer service but through the retailer's corporate public relations team. A spokesperson told me, "We aim to provide the best possible publishing experience for our authors and are coordinating directly with this author to ensure the payment issue is resolved.
"The lesson here? Don't leave checks uncashed in envelopes. You generally have six months from the day it's written to cash a business check. Some might go stale after just three months.
But should you find an uncashed check stuffed in an envelope years after it was sent to you, legally, those funds are still yours. The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written. Matt Gephardt has worked in television news for more than 20 years, and as a reporter since 2010.
He is now a consumer investigative reporter for KSL. You can find Matt on X at @KSLmatt or email him at matt@ksl.com. Sloan Schrage started as an “old man” intern with KSL TV in 2007. For the past ten years, he’s produced daily and investigative stories that impact safety, security and wallets of Utah consumers.
When he’s not at KSL, he’s either with his family or trying to repair cars with help from YouTube tutorials, or buying cameras or other photography gear that he’ll never use. More shoppers using short-term loans for essentials: Here's how to keep them in check
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