Most tenants who fight for a security deposit fight on the terrain the landlord chooses. The landlord says the carpet was stained, the walls needed paint, the apartment was left dirty—and the tenant is pulled into arguing about carpets and paint and cleaning, trying to prove the apartment was fine. That fight is winnable, but it is a slog, and it hands the landlord the advantage of framing the whole dispute around the condition of the unit.
There is another way to think about a withheld deposit, and a New York court decision shows exactly how it works. In Wagenheim v. Bencheikh, the tenant did not win by out-arguing the landlords about damage. He won on a quieter point most tenants have never heard of: the landlords had failed to tell him, in writing and during the tenancy, where his deposit was being held. That single omission created a legal inference that the landlords had mixed his money with their own—something New York law flatly forbids. The landlords could not rebut the inference, and because of that, they lost the right to keep any of the deposit. The condition of the apartment barely entered into it.
The decision, Wagenheim v. Bencheikh, 2023 NY Slip Op 50588(U), was issued on May 26, 2023, by the Appellate Term of the Supreme Court, Second Department, covering the Second, Eleventh, and Thirteenth Judicial Districts. The dollar figures are modest—the tenant recovered the $1,563.31 balance of his deposit—but the principle is large, and it is one that applies to an enormous number of New York tenancies. Your security deposit is not your landlord's money. The law treats it as money held in trust for you, and it requires landlords who put it in a bank to tell you where. When a landlord skips that step, the consequences can be severe, and they can defeat deductions the landlord might otherwise have been entitled to make.
This guide explains the banking rule at the center of the case, why it matters more than most tenants realize, how the inference of commingling works, and how the appellate court used it to correct a trial-court award that had shortchanged the tenant. If you are trying to understand where your deposit went and whether your landlord handled it the way the law requires, this is a part of the law worth knowing.
The facts are straightforward. A tenant moved out and sought the return of his security deposit. The landlords did not return all of it; a balance of $1,563.31 remained unpaid. The tenant sued in Civil Court to recover that balance, and he also asked for $3,000 in punitive damages, for a total claim of $4,563.31.
At trial, the Civil Court awarded the tenant only $750—less than half the unpaid balance—and the court did not explain how it arrived at that number. There was no stated basis for the $750. The tenant, having recovered a fraction of what he was owed and none of the punitive damages, appealed.
On appeal, the Appellate Term increased the award to the full $1,563.31, the entire unreturned balance of the deposit. The decisive issue was not the condition of the apartment or the legitimacy of any particular deduction. It was that the landlords had failed, during the tenancy, to provide the tenant with the written banking information that New York law requires. Under General Obligations Law § 7-103, a landlord must hold a security deposit in trust and, if the deposit is placed in a bank, must give the tenant written notice of the bank's name and address and the amount deposited. The landlords had not given that notice.
That failure mattered because of what the court drew from it. The missing banking notice created an inference that the landlords had commingled the deposit with their own personal funds—treated it, in other words, as their own money rather than as money held in trust. Commingling is itself a violation of the statute, and when a landlord commingles a deposit, the landlord forfeits the right to retain any part of it. The landlords did not rebut the inference. And the court held that providing the bank's name after the tenant had already moved out did not cure the problem; the notice has to come during the tenancy, when it can actually serve its purpose. Because the inference of commingling stood unrebutted, the landlords had forfeited the deposit, and the tenant was entitled to the full balance.
The appellate court did, however, decline to award punitive damages. Punitive damages under the deposit statute require a willful violation, and the court found no evidence that the landlords had willfully violated the law. So the tenant recovered his full deposit balance—corrected upward from the unexplained $750—but not the additional $3,000 he had sought. The win was complete on the deposit itself and did not extend to the penalty on top.
The foundation of this case, and of New York's entire approach to security deposits, is a principle that surprises many tenants and, apparently, some landlords: a security deposit remains the tenant's money. The landlord holds it, but does not own it. General Obligations Law § 7-103 states the rule directly—a security deposit "shall continue to be the money of the person making such deposit" and must be held in trust by the landlord. The landlord is a custodian, not an owner.
This trust principle has real consequences. Because the money still belongs to the tenant, the landlord may not treat it as part of the landlord's own funds. The landlord may not spend it, may not mix it into a personal or business account used for other purposes, and may not treat it as revenue. It sits in trust, available to be returned to the tenant at the end of the tenancy, subject only to lawful deductions properly accounted for. The statute even provides that if a landlord does commingle the deposit with their own money, the tenant becomes entitled to its return.
The trust concept is what makes the rest of the deposit rules coherent. The fourteen-day itemization requirement, the cap on how much a landlord can collect, the bank-notice requirement—all of them flow from the basic idea that this is the tenant's money, temporarily in the landlord's keeping. A landlord who understands that their role is custodial behaves very differently from one who treats deposits as a slush fund, and the law is written to force the former and punish the latter.
For a tenant, internalizing the trust principle changes how you think about a withheld deposit. The question is not only "did I damage anything?" It is also "did my landlord handle my money the way a trustee is required to?" A landlord who failed to hold the deposit properly—who commingled it, or who cannot show they kept it in trust—has a problem independent of anything about the condition of the apartment. Wagenheim is the case that shows how that independent problem can decide the whole dispute.
New York law does not just tell landlords to hold deposits in trust and leave it at that. For deposits placed in a bank, the law adds a specific, concrete obligation: the landlord must give the tenant written notice of the name and address of the banking institution where the deposit is held and the amount deposited. This is the requirement the landlords in Wagenheim failed to meet, and it is worth understanding why the law bothers with it—because at first glance it can look like a mere administrative formality, the kind of technicality that shouldn't decide a real dispute.
It is not a formality, and the case shows why. The bank-notice requirement is the mechanism that makes the trust obligation enforceable. A tenant has no way to know, on their own, whether the landlord actually set the deposit aside in a separate account or simply dropped it into a personal account and spent it. The deposit disappears into the landlord's hands at move-in, and the tenant cannot see what happens to it. The written bank notice is the tenant's window into that otherwise invisible process. It tells the tenant that the money exists, where it is, and how much is there—which is exactly the information a tenant would need to confirm that the landlord is treating the deposit as trust money rather than as their own.
Because the notice serves that verifying function, its absence is telling. If a landlord has genuinely held the deposit in a separate account, providing the notice costs nothing—a sentence naming the bank and the amount. A landlord who never gave that notice has, at a minimum, failed to do the one thing that would demonstrate compliance with the trust obligation. And the law treats that failure as significant precisely because the notice is the proof. When the proof is missing, the court is entitled to draw a conclusion about why.
This is the move that makes the bank-notice rule powerful rather than trivial. The requirement is not an end in itself; it is evidence of whether the deeper obligation—holding the money in trust—was honored. A landlord who skips it has removed the evidence of compliance, and the law responds by inferring non-compliance. That is why a requirement that looks like paperwork can defeat a landlord's deductions: the paperwork is the thing that would have shown the landlord kept the money properly, and its absence points the other way.
The heart of Wagenheim is the inference, so it is worth being precise about what an inference is and why it mattered so much here. The tenant did not have to prove, with bank records or testimony, that the landlords had actually dumped his deposit into a personal checking account and paid their own bills with it. Direct proof of commingling like that is usually impossible for a tenant to obtain, because the tenant has no access to the landlord's bank accounts. If a tenant had to prove commingling directly, the trust obligation would be nearly unenforceable in practice, because the one party who could prove it—the landlord—would have every incentive not to.
The law solves this with an inference. When a landlord fails to provide the required banking notice, the court is permitted to infer that the landlord commingled the deposit with personal funds. The tenant does not have to prove the commingling happened; the missing notice creates a presumption that it did. This shifts the practical burden onto the landlord, who is the party actually in a position to show what happened to the money. If the landlord did hold the deposit properly, the landlord can come forward with the account records and rebut the inference. If the landlord cannot or does not, the inference stands.
That distinction—between proving commingling directly and relying on an unrebutted inference—is the key to understanding how a tenant can win on this ground. The tenant in Wagenheim did not prove commingling. He relied on the inference that arose from the landlords' failure to give the banking notice. And crucially, the landlords did not rebut it. They did not come forward with evidence showing the deposit had been kept in a proper trust account separate from their own funds. Because the inference was unrebutted, it did the work that direct proof would otherwise have required. The court treated the deposit as commingled, and commingling meant forfeiture of the right to retain any part of it.
The landlords did make one attempt that failed. They supplied the name of the bank after the tenant had moved out. The court held this did not cure the defect. The reason connects back to the purpose of the notice: it is meant to be given during the tenancy, when it can actually tell the tenant where their money is and let them verify that it is being held properly. A bank name produced after the fact, once the tenancy is over and the dispute has arisen, does none of that. It does not retroactively show the deposit was held in trust throughout the tenancy, and it does not rebut the inference that arose from the failure to give timely notice. Late compliance is not compliance.
For a tenant, the practical lesson is that you may have a powerful claim even if you cannot see inside your landlord's bank accounts. If you never received written notice of where your deposit was held, that absence may itself create an inference that your landlord commingled the money—and unless the landlord can affirmatively show they held it properly, that inference can carry your case. You are not stuck having to prove the unprovable. The law puts the burden where the evidence actually is.
Wagenheim is also a clean illustration of a distinction that runs through all of New York's deposit law and that tenants frequently blur: the difference between recovering the deposit itself and recovering punitive damages on top of it. These are two different claims with two different standards, and winning the first does not get you the second.
Recovery of the deposit flowed from the commingling inference. The landlords' failure to give the banking notice, left unrebutted, meant they had forfeited the right to keep the deposit, so the full $1,563.31 balance went back to the tenant. That outcome did not depend on proving anything about the landlords' state of mind. It depended on the structure of the trust obligation and the inference that arose from the missing notice.
Punitive damages are a separate matter. Under the deposit statute, a tenant may recover punitive damages—up to twice the deposit—only where the landlord's violation was willful. Willfulness is a higher standard than a mere violation. It requires something more than failing to comply; it requires a knowing or deliberate disregard of the landlord's obligations, and it has to be supported by evidence in the record. In Wagenheim, the tenant asked for $3,000 in punitive damages, but the court found no evidence that the landlords had willfully violated the law. Without that evidence, the punitive claim failed, even though the deposit claim succeeded completely.
So the tenant recovered everything he was actually owed on the deposit and nothing extra. This is the honest, realistic picture tenants should carry into any deposit dispute: the violation that gets your deposit back is not automatically a willful violation that doubles it. A landlord can fail to give the banking notice, lose the deposit to the commingling inference, and still not have acted willfully in a way that supports punitive damages. The two questions are distinct. You can be entirely right that the landlord violated the trust and banking rules, recover your full deposit on that basis, and still not be entitled to the penalty if the willfulness is not there.
This matters for how you frame a claim. Asking for punitive damages is reasonable when the facts genuinely suggest willful misconduct—a landlord who plainly knew the rules and flouted them, who has done this repeatedly, who behaved in bad faith. But demanding the penalty as though it comes automatically with any violation invites the result the tenant got in Wagenheim on that point: the deposit, which is the real win, without the extra. Set your expectations by the standard, not by the hope.
One of the most practically encouraging features of Wagenheim is what it shows about the appeal itself. The trial court awarded the tenant $750 with no stated basis—less than half what he was owed—and the appellate court corrected it, raising the award to the full $1,563.31. For tenants who assume that whatever a lower court decides is final, or that appealing is hopeless, this is a useful corrective.
The trial court's $750 award is the kind of result that leaves a tenant feeling the system is arbitrary. The tenant was owed $1,563.31. He got less than half, with no explanation of how the court landed on that figure. A tenant in that position might reasonably conclude that the court simply split the difference, and that there was nothing to be done about it. But there was. The appellate court reviewed the award, found that the law entitled the tenant to the full deposit balance because of the unrebutted commingling inference, and corrected the number upward.
This illustrates something important about the appellate process in these cases. An appellate court is not bound to accept a trial court's unexplained number, especially where the trial court's award is inconsistent with what the law requires on the facts. Where the legal consequence is forfeiture of the entire deposit—because of a commingling inference the landlord did not rebut—a trial court that awards only part of the deposit has made an error the appellate court can fix. The tenant does not have to live with a result that does not match the law.
There are, of course, real limits and costs to appealing. Appeals take time, they have their own procedural requirements, and they are not the right step for every case. But the lesson of Wagenheim is that a disappointing or inexplicable trial-court award is not necessarily the end of the road. Where the law clearly entitles a tenant to more than they received, an appeal can bring the award into line with what the statute actually requires. The tenant here nearly doubled his recovery by appealing a result that shortchanged him.
For a tenant weighing whether to accept a partial award, this is worth keeping in mind—ideally with the input of someone who can assess the specific situation. If a court has awarded you substantially less than the deposit you are owed, and the legal basis for full recovery is strong, the trial-court number may not be the last word.
It helps to translate the legal machinery into an ordinary situation, because the gap between "the statute provides" and "what do I actually do" is where tenants get stuck.
Imagine you rented an apartment, paid a security deposit, and lived there for a couple of years. At no point did you receive anything in writing telling you which bank held your deposit or how much was being held. You never thought about it—most tenants don't. When you moved out, the landlord returned part of your deposit but kept a chunk of it, pointing to some cleaning and minor repairs. You think the deductions are inflated, but you are not sure you can prove the apartment was spotless, and you are dreading a fight about carpets and paint.
Wagenheim suggests a different angle. The fact that you never received written notice of where your deposit was held is not a minor detail. It may create an inference that the landlord commingled your deposit with their own funds, in violation of the trust obligation. Unless the landlord can come forward and affirmatively show they held your deposit in a proper separate account—with records, not just an after-the-fact mention of a bank name—that inference can carry your claim, and commingling means the landlord forfeits the right to keep any of the deposit. The argument about cleaning and repairs may never need to be reached.
What you would actually do with that is manageable. You would gather what you have: your lease, proof of the deposit amount you paid, any communications with the landlord, and—critically—a clear account of what written notices you did and did not receive during the tenancy. The absence of a banking notice is something you can establish; you are testifying to a negative, that no such notice ever came. You would send a written demand for the return of your deposit. And if that did not produce your money, you would consider small claims court, where you could raise the landlord's failure to provide the banking notice and the inference of commingling that follows from it.
The reason this hypothetical tracks the real case so closely is that the real case is this hypothetical. A tenant sought the balance of his deposit, the landlords had never given the required banking notice, the inference of commingling arose and went unrebutted, and the tenant recovered his full balance—after correcting a trial court that had initially given him less than half. The facts are ordinary. That is what makes the case useful: the banking rule is not an exotic weapon for sophisticated litigants, but a protection available to any tenant whose landlord skipped a step the law requires.
Knowing the rule is one thing; using it is another. Here is how to move from understanding Wagenheim to protecting your own deposit.
Start by asking a question you may never have thought to ask: did you ever receive written notice of where your deposit was held? Think back over the tenancy. Did the landlord ever tell you, in writing, the name and address of the bank holding your deposit and the amount? For most tenants, the answer is no—and that "no" is the opening the banking rule provides. The absence of that notice is not just an oversight on the landlord's part; it may be the basis for an inference that the deposit was commingled.
Gather your documentation. This includes your lease or proof of the tenancy; proof of the deposit amount you paid; any written communications from the landlord, including, importantly, the absence of any banking notice; and records of the deposit's return or non-return at the end of the tenancy. You are building a record that shows what you paid, what you got back, and what notices you never received.
Raise the banking rule, not just the condition of the apartment. Many tenants instinctively frame a deposit dispute entirely around whether the apartment was damaged. Wagenheim shows that the landlord's handling of the money is a separate and sometimes stronger ground. If you never received the banking notice, say so, and understand that it may create an inference of commingling that puts the burden on the landlord to show they held your deposit properly. You do not have to prove the commingling; you point to the missing notice and let the inference do its work unless the landlord rebuts it.
Send a written demand before going to court. State that you are owed the return of your deposit, note the amount, and ask for it by a specific date. Keep a copy. This gives the landlord a clear opportunity to pay without litigation and strengthens your position if you end up in court, because it shows you asked properly.
Consider small claims court. New York's small claims courts are designed for exactly this kind of dispute. They are meant to be navigable without a lawyer, the filing fees are low, and deposit claims—including those built on the banking and trust rules—are squarely within their reach. Wagenheim itself began as a Civil Court case, and the tenant pursued it through an appeal, so the path from small claims to a corrected result is well traveled.
Be honest and precise about punitive damages. If, and only if, the facts genuinely support willfulness, ask for punitive damages as well—but be prepared to show the willful conduct, and understand that it will not be awarded simply because the landlord violated the rules. The tenant in Wagenheim recovered his full deposit but not the punitive damages he sought, because willfulness was not established. Frame your own claim with that distinction in mind.
Know when to get advice. Small claims court is built for self-represented tenants, and many deposit cases are within reach without a lawyer. But if your situation is complicated—a large deposit, a landlord who claims to have held the money properly and has records to show it, a partial trial-court award you are considering appealing, or issues beyond the deposit—it is worth talking to a tenant attorney or a local tenant-rights organization. Many offer free or low-cost consultations, and legal aid organizations across New York assist tenants with exactly these questions. Appeals in particular are worth discussing with someone who can weigh the costs and the odds in your specific case.
The banking notice is one piece of a larger set of protections, and seeing it in context helps a tenant recognize when more than one of them is in play—because a real deposit dispute often implicates several at once.
The trust obligation and the banking notice both come from General Obligations Law § 7-103, but that is only part of the statutory scheme. Section 7-108 adds the rules most tenants eventually learn about: the fourteen-day requirement to return the deposit or provide an itemized statement of deductions after move-out, and the forfeiture of the right to retain the deposit if that deadline is missed. The law also caps the deposit a landlord may collect—for most residential tenancies, no more than one month's rent—so a tenant who was made to pay more than that at the start has a separate issue, independent of how the deposit was handled or returned. And in many cases tenants have a right to a pre-move-out inspection, designed to let them cure problems before leaving rather than be charged for them afterward.
What Wagenheim adds to that familiar picture is the reminder that the handling of the money during the tenancy—not just its return at the end—is governed by law and can decide a dispute. Many tenants think of deposit rights as kicking in only at move-out, when the accounting happens. But the trust and banking obligations apply throughout the tenancy. From the moment you hand over the deposit, it is your money held in trust, and the landlord is supposed to be able to show where it is. A violation of that obligation can be established without any reference to the move-out accounting at all, as it was in Wagenheim, where the decisive failure was the absence of a banking notice during the tenancy.
These protections also interact in useful ways. A tenant might have both a banking-rule argument and a fourteen-day argument. Suppose a landlord never gave the banking notice and also sent the itemized statement late. Each failure, on its own, can forfeit the landlord's right to retain the deposit—the late itemization under § 7-108 and the commingling inference under § 7-103. A tenant in that position has two independent paths to the same result, which is a strong position to be in. Even if a court were unpersuaded by one, the other might carry the day. Understanding the full scheme lets a tenant see all the arguments available rather than fixating on the single one they happened to know about.
The deposit protections travel with the deposit, too. If the building is sold during the tenancy, the deposit obligations generally transfer to the new owner, and a tenant does not lose the right to recover the deposit simply because ownership changed hands. And the protections apply broadly across residential tenancies, including month-to-month arrangements that continued informally after an original lease expired. The informality of a tenancy does not weaken the trust obligation or the banking-notice requirement.
For a tenant assessing a withheld deposit, the practical takeaway is to run through the whole checklist rather than stopping at the condition of the apartment. Did you ever receive written notice of where your deposit was held? Was the deposit returned, or itemized, within fourteen days of move-out? Was the deposit within the legal cap? Did the building change hands? Was there a pre-move-out inspection right that could have changed things? Any one of these can matter, and more than one may apply at the same time. The banking rule in Wagenheim is powerful precisely because it is one many tenants overlook—but it works best as part of a complete understanding of the protections the law provides.
Several intuitive but mistaken beliefs keep tenants from using the banking rule, and Wagenheim speaks directly to each.
The first misconception is that a deposit dispute is always a fight about the condition of the apartment. It is not. The landlord's handling of the money is a separate ground, and sometimes a stronger one. A tenant who assumes they cannot win because they are not sure the apartment was spotless may be overlooking a banking-rule argument that does not depend on the apartment's condition at all. In Wagenheim, the decisive issue was the missing banking notice, not the state of the unit.
The second misconception is that you have to prove your landlord actually misused your money. You do not. Proving commingling directly—showing that the landlord dropped your deposit into a personal account and spent it—is usually impossible for a tenant, who has no access to the landlord's accounts. The law does not require that. The missing banking notice creates an inference of commingling, and unless the landlord rebuts it, the inference carries the point. You rely on what you can establish—that no notice ever came—and let the burden shift to the landlord.
The third misconception is that the banking notice is just paperwork that courts will overlook. It is not a formality; it is the evidence that the trust obligation was honored, and its absence is treated as meaningful precisely because providing it would have been so easy for a compliant landlord. A requirement that looks administrative is doing substantive work: it is the tenant's only window into whether the deposit was held properly.
The fourth misconception is that a landlord can fix the problem after the fact. In Wagenheim, the landlords supplied the bank's name after the tenant had moved out, and the court held it did not cure the defect. The notice has to come during the tenancy, when it can serve its purpose. Late compliance does not rebut the inference or undo the violation. A tenant should not be talked out of a valid claim by a landlord who belatedly produces a bank name once the dispute has started.
The fifth misconception is that any deposit violation automatically means double damages. It does not. Recovering the deposit and recovering punitive damages are two different claims, and the punitive multiplier requires a willful violation that is actually established. The tenant in Wagenheim recovered his full deposit but not the $3,000 in punitive damages he sought, because willfulness was not shown. Ask for the penalty only when the facts support willfulness, and expect to have to prove it.
The sixth misconception is that a disappointing trial-court award is final. It is not necessarily. The tenant in Wagenheim was awarded only $750 at trial, with no stated basis, and the appellate court corrected the award to the full $1,563.31. Where the law clearly entitles a tenant to more than they received, an appeal can bring the award into line with what the statute requires. A partial or unexplained award is not always the last word.
It is worth being candid about the scope of a decision like Wagenheim v. Bencheikh. It is an Appellate Term decision, which carries more weight than a trial-level ruling and can guide lower courts within its districts, but it is a short decision resolving the particular dispute in front of it. Its value for a tenant is less that it makes sweeping new law and more that it cleanly applies and explains rules that already exist. The trust obligation, the banking-notice requirement, the forfeiture consequence of commingling, and the willfulness standard for punitive damages all come from General Obligations Law § 7-103 and the related deposit provisions. Wagenheim shows how a court reads and enforces them, and it is a particularly useful illustration because it turns on the banking rule rather than on the condition of the apartment—a ground many tenants never consider.
What the case does not do is promise any particular outcome in your situation. Every deposit dispute turns on its own facts—what you paid, what notices you received, whether the landlord can show the deposit was held in trust, and whether the landlord's conduct crosses into willfulness. A landlord who did give proper banking notice, or who can produce records showing the deposit was held in a separate account, presents a very different case from the landlords in Wagenheim, who gave no timely notice and did not rebut the inference. A court faced with different facts could reach a different result. The point of understanding the case is to understand the rules and how they are applied, so you can assess your own position clearly, not to assume your facts guarantee the same recovery.
What is reliable, because it comes from the statute and not just from one decision, is the underlying framework. In New York, a security deposit remains the tenant's money, held in trust by the landlord. A landlord who places the deposit in a bank must give the tenant written notice of the bank's name and address and the amount deposited. A failure to do so can create an inference that the landlord commingled the deposit with personal funds, and commingling means the landlord forfeits the right to retain any part of it—an inference the landlord must affirmatively rebut, and which a belated bank name after move-out does not cure. Separately, punitive damages are available only for a willful violation that is actually established. And a trial-court award that falls short of what the law requires can be corrected on appeal. Those are the tools. Wagenheim shows one tenant using them.
The most useful thing to take from this case is a shift in how you think about a withheld deposit. The instinct is to fight about the apartment—to prove it was clean, to argue the deductions were unfair. That fight has its place. But Wagenheim points to a different and often stronger question: did your landlord handle your money the way the law requires? Your deposit is not your landlord's money. It is yours, held in trust, and a landlord who places it in a bank must tell you where. A landlord who skipped that step has not just committed a paperwork error; they may have created an inference that they treated your money as their own—and that inference can defeat their deductions entirely.
For you as a tenant, that means two things. First, ask whether you ever received written notice of where your deposit was held. If you did not, that absence may be the foundation of your claim, independent of the condition of the apartment, because it can shift the burden to the landlord to prove they held your money in trust. Second, keep the deposit and the penalty separate in your own mind: the banking rule can get your full deposit back, but the extra punitive damages require proving willfulness, which is a higher bar. And if a court awards you less than you are owed, remember that the number is not always final—an appeal corrected the award in Wagenheim from less than half to the full balance.
A deposit is your money, and New York law gives you specific, enforceable tools to get it back when a landlord holds it improperly. One of the most overlooked is the banking rule—the requirement that your landlord tell you where your money is being kept. The first step is knowing that your security deposit is not your landlord's money, and that the law has a way of finding out when a landlord forgot that.
