RSS LJ

October 23, 2003

Stupid bank redux ()

by fluffy at 4:54 PM
The stupid bank is still stupid. Yet another bit of stupidity thanks to their ATM operations being totally separated from the rest of the bank...

Basically, what happened was I made a deposit for $468 a week ago (while my balance was $21), then did two withdrawals (timed for after the deposit cleared), $100 into Paypal and then the rest into ING. But even though they had a record of the deposit happening on the ATM side, they didn't actually have the deposit go through on the bank side, because the runner who was responsible for picking up the ATM deposits that day was sick.

So, they notified the bank not to bounce any withdrawals from my account, but they still charged me two overdrafts and let my balance go negative and charged me several "negative balance" fees.

Of course, I didn't get the first overdraft notice until today.

So I called the bank on the phone, talked to several CSRs, and finally got bounced to someone who knew what to do about this. I explained the situation yet again, and she said she'd check all of the records, and call me back.

A couple hours later, I got a call (from the same person who wrote me the letter, incidentally) explaining what happened, and they're reversing all of the charges. I made sure that the balance afterwards was exactly what I'd expected it to be beforehand (namely $0.00).

This is only the second time I've had an overdraft with this bank. The first time was three years ago, and a $5 purchase ended up costing me around $180 in fees (mostly because it took me a whole month to get the overdraft notice, and I didn't use that account much then either). Of course, they wouldn't budge at all, even though nowhere did they say that there was a daily "negative balance" charge anyway. They were more than happy to offer me an expensive overdraft "protection" service which would have cost way more in the long run than that one-time $180 gaffe anyway, though.

At least my opinion of them isn't totally negative right now. (Too bad they'd only done anything to even try to vindicate themselves a couple months before I'm going to leave anyway!)

Comments