The Embarrassing Cheque is a confidence trick which may also be an urban legend. A confidence trick, confidence game, also known as a con, scam, grift or flim flam, is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the mark) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. ... An urban legend is a kind of modern folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them. ...

The scam was supposedly performed by a company selling pornography or other sex aids and trading under a highly explicit name (e.g., "The Anal Sex And Fetish Pornography Company"). Customers were invited to purchase adult material from the company, and were assured that the actual transaction could be made with a separate company with a non-explicit name in order to prevent the explicit name from appearing on transaction logs and bank statements. Pornographic movies Pornography (from Greek πόρνη (porne) prostitute and γραφή (grafe) writing), more informally referred to as porn or porno, is the representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal. ...

In fact, the company did not have any items to sell. Once a sufficient number of customers had sent money for items, the company sent out letters of apology to all of them, and also sent them refunds - in the form of company cheques clearly printed with the explicit company name. All of the customers were too embarrassed to pay in a cheque that was clearly from "The Anal Sex And Fetish Pornography Company", so the scammers running the company got to keep the money - and had technically committed no crime, as technically they had made every effort to refund the money. The authors of snopes.com have pointed out [1] that customers could cash the cheques via ATM or mail and thus avoid having to confront a bank worker in person. This would not have prevented, however, the cheque description potentially appearing on their customer file. The Urban Legends Reference Pages (also known as snopes. ...

It is not known if this trick ever actually happened or not. It is referred to in the film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels but existed as a legend prior to that. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) is a British film directed and written by Guy Ritchie. ...