Majestic Building Maintenance, Inc. v. Huntington Bancshares Incorporated

Facts

In November 2010, Plaintiff, through its president, Luther McNeil, opened a business checking account with Defendant on behalf of the company. Plaintiff was a commercial cleaning services company. Defendant was a bank that had its customers assent to a services agreement wherein Defendant offered fraud detection services but disclaimed all liability in the event that fraud should occur with the customer’s account if the customer should fail to enroll the in services offered when eligible. McNeil was not given a signed copy of this agreement when he opened the account nor was he advised of the details contained in the services agreement, including the nature of the fraud prevention services offered by Defendant. McNeil ordered hologram checks from the account in order to help his company, Plaintiff, detect fraud. Later, four fraudulent checks were debited from Plaintiff’s account. These checks did not bear the hologram that McNeil had ordered and were shown to be duplicates of checks that Plaintiff had already written and Defendant had properly paid. When Plaintiff contacted Defendant regarding the fraudulent checks, Defendant responded that Plaintiff had not exercised reasonable care because it had declined to use Defendant’s “Check Positive Pay/Reverse Positive Pay” services, which substantially contributed to the making of the forged checks. Defendant refused to reimburse Plaintiff for the checks and Plaintiff initiated a putative class action suit to recover.