eflouret - 5:18 pm on Sep 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

Sorry if it is not the place to post this, but since it involves Adsense, I thought this was the right place.

It is common that living here in Argentina, I get checks lost in the mail. Specially during the last months of the year.

But it never happened to me that somebody cashed those lost checks...

until this year...

I had two checks stolen and cashed. One from VTC training company and the other from... GOOGLE ADSENSE!

These two checks were for an amount of less than $200

No big deal for many of you, but for third worlders is a nice amount of money.

Of course both companies told me that they have paid and there was nothing they could do about this.

Upon my request, Google kindly took time to send me a scanned copy of the check, and I discovered that it was cashed at an italian Bank. I will investigate more about this.

I have a couple of questions that maybe some of you can answer or at least point me which direction to go:

1) Is it so that these companies cannot do anything to recover these payments? I never received the checks, so I consider that they never paid me.

2) Did this happen to any of you? If so, what did you do in that case?

3) Is there an easy (well, I know that there is no easy way...) to open an international bank account without travelling to USA?

I receive checks from other small companies and after a coupe of lost checks, we agreed to use a more expensive and secure mail. But that was impossible to agree with a large company sucha as Amazon, and I suppose that Google will be in the same situation for being large companies with structured payment processes. Anyway I will try them.

Enrique