David Woolley wrote:

Ronald Raygun wrote:

Why? Do the terms generally forbid the giving of undated cheques?

I think you are talking about the difference between what is legal what
is not proveably illegal. It was already stated that guaranteed cheques
shouldn't be undated.

I don't think that was stated, at least not in the sense that the bank
would require its customer to date the cheque. The guarantee is a benefit
to the payee, not to the drawer (except indirectly where a payee will not
accept payment by unguaranteed cheque), and that benefit is conditional
upon a number of technicalities being observed, one of which being that
the cheque should be dated when issued.

Thus a payee wishing to enjoy the benefit of the guarantee has the right
to insist that the drawer date the cheque properly. But in this special
situation the loan shop (the real villain of this piece) is specifically
insisting that the drawer *not* date the cheque, so that the shop can
pretend to the bank that the cheque was issued much later than in fact
it was. Remember that the purpose of the cheque here is to serve as
security for a cash loan, and the expectation is that the loan will be
repaid in cash, and the cheque will then be returned to the borrower
and torn up. The shop only ever intends to present the cheque to the
borrower's bank in the event that she fails to repay the loan when due.
This would usually be weeks later.

If someone provides both an undated cheque, and a
guarantee card, it seems to me that they intend to breach that condition.

Not at all. If the drawer *were* to date the cheque properly, the shop
would be unable to store it for delayed presentation, since this would
also void the guarantee.

By requiring the date to be left blank, the shop is deliberately placing
itself at risk of the guarantee being voided, and so it should not be
surprised at all to find a customer willing to put this to the test.

There is a legal question over the meaning of "issued". When is a cheque
issued? I'd expect the answer to be when it is completed by the drawer.
In the normal case, a payee will receive a cheque only after it has been
issued. What the shop wants to achieve here, is to be able to claim that
it received it before it was issued, i.e. it needs to argue that it can
act as proxy for the drawer to finish or complete the issuing process by
filling in the date. It needs to be authorised by the drawer to do this.
I dare say this setup is possible in law, but it is undoubtedly contrary
at least to the spirit of the rules of the guarantee.

It is not clear whether the bank has discretion to honour the guarantee
even in the event of a technical irregularity with the date. It may not

Normally they would have discretion to honour it as though it weren't
guaranteed and generally businesses always draft contracts to give
themselves discretion, but absolutely bind the consumer.

Fair enough, but the background suggests that circumstances are such
that -but for the guarantee- the bank would probably have exercised the
discretion to bounce the cheque, since -reading between the lines- not
doing so would make the account overdrawn, if it isn't already.