Meet Matt. He’s is the writer of the most reasonable, calm, thoughtful letter we’ve ever gotten from someone whose bank misplaced a check for $14,000. That bank is Bank of America, and they’ve lost a customer. Was it because their ATM ate the check? Not really. It was because they couldn’t even bother to act concerned about it. Matt is ready for a bank that thinks $14,000 is important. [More]
Reader R Turner has a cautionary tale about Bank of America. He says a BofA error led to a late charge on his credit card account, then without his authorization the bank took out a cash advance to cover the payment.
Taking outsourcing to an extreme, Bank of New Zealand decided that instead of figuring out why one woman’s charges ended up on another customer’s account, they would just give the customer the woman’s name, home address, work address, email address and cellphone number so they could settle things for themselves.
Commerce Bank in central Pennsylvania is changing its name. Former Commerce Banks in that area will now be called Metro Bank. Yawn, right? Banks merge and change names all the time. What they don’t normally do is cancel ATM cards with no notice, and lock customers out of their accounts due to those changes. Maybe this is a new trend.
It’s sure to be a pain in the butt if you accidentally switch two of your payments — but we’d always assumed that companies like AT&T and Dell wouldn’t cash checks that were not even made out to them. We we wrong!
Reader Ophelia has a problem. It seems that after 10 years of perfect customer service from Bank of America, they suddenly decided to treat her checking account like a savings account and are charging her hundreds of dollars in “over use” fees. Her apoplectic letter is inside.
Poor Jacob. He only wanted to deposit a $2,019 check with Bank of America. Apparently, this was enough to provoke the bank into shutting down his account, leading to overdraft fees whenever Jacob tried to access his money.
That economic stimulus check you were expecting may have accidentally stimulated your neighbor’s bank account. Newsday is reporting that 15,000 checks tumbled astray thanks to an IRS “computer programming glitch.”
Reader G writes:
On Saturday 3/8/08 at approximately 4pm I went to a drive-up ATM at the Wachovia Bank branch located at 951 South George Mason Drive, Arlington, VA 22204. I put my card in and asked to withdraw $80. The machine was acting normally until it was supposed to dispense the money.
Dan got a new job (Congratulations, Dan!) and moved from Chicago to Indianapolis. The move meant he had to close his Citibank account and open a new one. He chose Chase because they have lots of branches nearby.
Julie would really like to pay her mortgage, but she can’t. Why not? Because when she tried to help her son buy a MacBook, Apple decided to debit $1517.27 from her account without permission. When she called to tell them they’d pulled the money from the wrong card, causing her account to over draft, they apologized and told her they’d fix it. Instead, they debited another $186 from Julie’s account, and another $1517.27 from her son’s account.