Samantha,
I can honestly say, as many others here can, I have been there! A combination of fear and anger has you shaking so hard you cannot think straight, and you feel like the ground has just fallen out from underneath you.
How do you go on? How do you defend yourself? Just keep doing what you are doing. Remember that your worst crime in all of this was trusting that your bank was telling you the truth when they told you that the check was fine and that you could use that money. In one of your messages you said
Quote:
My bank called me a week later to cnfirm the check was fine, everything checked out and I had nothing to worry about.
Do you have the name of the person who told you that? You were worried about this money, you asked them if it was okay to use the money, from what I can tell you waited a couple of weeks before you did start using the money just to be extra safe. If the bank said the money was okay to use, then your defence is that you asked the right questions and they gave you the wrong answers. Ask
them what you did wrong, and if they cannot answer that then why are they holding you liable if you did nothing wrong.
I asked my former bank this same question, and they were never able to answer it.