Court Opinion

ID: 9517123
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 00:04:33.652639+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:43:28.220461
License: Public Domain

O’Connor, J.
(dissenting). BayBank Middlesex (Bay-Bank) accepted Minster State Bank’s cashier’s check for deposit and collection and transferred it to Minster, which paid it. Minster seeks repayment from BayBank on the ground that BayBank warranted to Minster that the payees’ endorsements were genuine. See G. L. c. 106, § 4-207 (2) (b) (1990 ed.). Minster is entitled to recover unless Bauerband was an “impostor” who, by the use of mails or otherwise, induced Minster to issue the check to him payable to him and Michelle. G. L. c. 106, § 3-405 (1990 ed.).
Clearly, as the court’s recitation of the relevant facts shows, Bauerband by fraud induced Minster to issue the check to him payable to himself and Michelle. However, in my view, it is equally clear that Bauerband was not an impostor, by the use of mail or otherwise, and therefore Minster is entitled to recover.
A District Court judge granted summary judgment to BayBank aft.er concluding that Bauerband was an impostor by reason of his “impersonation of himself as Michelle’s agent.” The Appellate Division of the District Court Depart*836ment dismissed the report and affirmed the judgment but rejected the judge’s reasoning, concluding instead that Bauer-band had “impersonated his wife’s participation in the transaction with Minster at every relevant stage.”
It is clear from the record that, although Bauerband perpetrated a fraud on Minster, he did not do so as an impostor. An impostor is “[o]ne who pretends to be somebody other than who he is, with intent to deceive . . . .” Black’s Law Dictionary 756 (6th ed. 1990). An impostor speaks by act or word and he speaks about himself. He may speak by mail or otherwise, but he must speak to someone other than himself, he must speak in the present tense, and he must say that he is someone who in fact he is not. For a person to be an impostor by mail, he must state explicitly or implicitly in the mailed material that he is someone else. At no time, by mail or otherwise, did Bauerband explicitly or implicitly tell Minster that he was Michelle.
It is unclear whether the court has concluded that Bauer-band impersonated Michelle when he signed her name to the note, or only when he sent the signed note to the bank. Surely, if Bauerband had destroyed the note immediately after signing Michelle’s name to it, it could not reasonably be said that he had impersonated Michelle. Without communication there can be no impersonation. It may well be that, if Minster had sent the unsigned note to Michelle and the note had called for execution by Michelle alone, which was not the case, and Bauerband had forged her signature and returned the note to Minster without a covering letter, or with a letter purporting to have been sent by Michelle, impersonation would have occurred. Impersonation would have occurred in those circumstances because the mailing would have falsely represented that Michelle, not Bauerband, was the correspondent. However, the note in this case required execution by Bauerband and Michelle and it was not sent to Michelle alone. Thus, regardless of whether, when Bauer-band returned the note, he did so without a covering letter to which he signed his name, a matter about which the record is silent, the mailing did not imply that Michelle was the corre*837spondent. Bauerband implied that Michelle had signed the note, and that was a lie, but he did not act as an impostor because he did not at any time represent to Minster that he was someone other than the person he was. Respectfully, to say as the Appellate Division said, that Bauerband impersonated “his wife’s participation” is a misuse of the term “impersonated.” A person can only impersonate another person; he cannot “impersonate” an activity. Bauerband “misrepresented” his wife’s participation. He did not “impersonate” it, and he did not impersonate her.
The court cites with apparent approval two New York trial court opinions as supporting the court’s result. The court rejects the contrary decisions of appellate courts in other jurisdictions as “not particularly persuasive for our purposes.” Ante at 833. In my view, those cases are not fairly distinguishable from the present case and they ought not be so lightly dismissed. They were rightly decided. They are in accord both with sound logic and with the Supreme Judicial Court’s dictum in Gordon v. State St. Bank & Trust Co., 361 Mass. 258 (1972). In that case, the court dismissed, as unworthy of discussion, the thought that a man acted as an impostor within G. L. c. 106, § 3-405 (1) (a), when he induced a lender to issue a check by misrepresenting to the lender that the man’s wife had signed the note when in fact, as in this case, the man had forged his wife’s signature.
If the Legislature had intended that a forgery that induces a check’s issuance should result in the risk of loss being placed on the drawer rather than on collecting banks, it could easily have so provided in the statute. Instead, the Legislature chose to place the risk on the drawer only when the drawer was induced to issue the check by fraud in the form of impersonation. Reasonable persons might differ as to whether, in the absence of a controlling statute, the loss in a case such as the one on review should fall on the drawer, which issued a check in reliance on documents with forged signatures, or instead should fall on the collecting bank which accepted a check with a forged endorsement. However, the Legislature has spoken, placing the loss on the col*838lecting bank, and the court is obliged to apply the statute as enacted. I would reverse the order of the Appellate Division dismissing the report, and I would remand the case for the entry of judgment for Minster State Bank.