USD Cheque

Yes send the cheque back to the sender via airmail or surface mail if you want to save a few coppers and request that the funds be sent to you in UK Pounds.

It's nominally worth just over £5, right? So if you banked it there, you'd actually lose nearly £5.

So one more cost effective alternative would be to throw it away and forget about it. You get nothing, but that's still £5 better than minus £5.

Alternatively you could tear it up and tell the person who sent you it that it had been stolen, and would they please tell their bank to put a stop on it. Then tell them that actually, rather than sending you another one, would they mind paying you by other means, such as [spit] paypal.

Or tell them to forget the 59 cents and to send you $10 cash. Take this to your post office and get it changed.

Or maybe you could get them to use their credit card to order a CD or a book from somewhere and have it sent to you.

Yes, you could use Auctionchex

The message from snipped-for-privacy@googlemail.com contains these words:

Thanks to all who replied. I decided to take the advice of b05aj7wu.

I've sent the cheque off to auctionchex who tell me I'll get about 4. I know there is a chance that I'll get nothing at all but the alternative was to just throw the cheque away.

I'll post again when (if) I receive anything.

That's would be a good deal, if you actually get the money.

Please do post the results here as I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in a way to deal with low-value foreign currency cheques.

Chris