Accused in sec 138 negotiable instrument act

I agree with the analysis of  Mr.Trivedi.

Mr Sainath you are a seasoned advocate , pl tell at what stage of a criminal procedding of cheque bounce the accused will deny the signature.

Dear Mr. Trivedi,

Your question is valid. I feel that in this case, the bank screwed up and I wonder if anything fishy was involved.

Since the dormant account had been closed more than 10 years back, the bank had no handy record of specimen signature.  They could not even easily find the account when I first enquired after receiving notice.

I also did not remember even having an account.

It is when I insisted by sending them a copy of the notice that they took the trouble to search through their old records to find the account.

I am upset that in order to cut short their work, they returned the cheques for "insufficient funds" reason (wonder if someone played something), where as they were not even sure if the account existed or not. Forget about the bank matching the signatures.

The point is you need to get a letter from bank that the signature on the cheque was not yours, you also should get a letter from the Bank that this account has been non functioning since 10 years or so, you should also get a letter from Bank that the cheque book containing this particular leaf was issued around 10 years Bank. You should also have the counterfoil of the cheque book handy, you should also be willing to get into the ageing test of the matter written on the cheque. The signature ideally should be denied at the early stage, even at the stage of reply to notice, but still it is not fatal to your case. Execution of cheque is more than signature, if whatever you are saying is truth, then the other matter like payee name, amount etc is also not written by the drawer, deny this and then the complainant has to prove the execution of document called cheque.

Whatever is mentioned in the complaint will surely mismatch with above facts, so it will be easy for defense to probablise the case and get out of it. 

Dear Mr. Trivedi,

More than 1 cheque has been misused.  Each one is filled in a different handwriting - none in mine.

The million dollar question is even I do not remember if I had signed on the cheque leaves 20  years back.