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Cashiers Check Limitations

Viva Las Vegas!

Some of the biggest cashier's checks, both literally and figuratively, are transacted in Las Vegas, Nevada. Be it in the form of a payout by a casino to a big winner of a progressive slots jackpot, or for use to settle an outstanding gambling debt.

One celebrity who has experienced high-profile gambling debt problems is former NBA basketball great Charles Barkley, now a commentator for the TNT cable TV network. In 2008 for example, as part of his ongoing efforts to settle some delinquent Las Vegas debts, Barkley sent a cashier's check in the amount of $400,000 to Wynn Las Vegas. This is an example of a high dollar amount cashier's check, made possible by the individual wealth and holdings of the person on whose behalf it was issued.

Technical Amount Limit

A few years ago, a very foolish criminal tried to cash a fraudulent cashier's check for $360 billion. Part of the reason this was so wrong-headed, beyond the fact that the richest man in the world - Mexican wireless provider entrepreneur Carlos Sim Helu - has no more than $53 billion, has to do with check printing limitations.

The character field limit for a bank check, cashier's or otherwise, is 12. In other words, the most any cashier's check could ever be written for is $99,999,999.99, or just under $100 billion. Even so, had the scammer mentioned above tried to do that, he probably still would have elicited a great amount of suspicion. For now, real estate and corporate merger deals are where the largest cashier's check amounts are usually exchanged.