Creative accounting - or adventures in losing deposits and inventing fees
I had a Bank of America account. I was mostly happy with it despite deciding to switch to a local credit union for the sake of convenience — until they pulled some really fancy “switcheroos” on my account and managed to cost me just over $200 and my Mom $35.
My Mom had sent me a $200 check and had sent it by depositing it in her state with one of my deposit slips. This shouldn’t have been a problem. In fact, it posted to my account — as in was all the way deposited. So I wrote a check to move most of the money to my credit union. This proved to be a mistake. How? Because later that day, Bank of America pulled the check out, later claiming to have “lost” the deposit. I didn’t find this out by Bank of America, however. I found out by my Credit Union, Bank of America never did send any notice.
Bank of America quietly sat, racking up daily fees because I wasn’t making up for the lost deposit — in large part because I didn’t yet have official notice. It took several days to get them to admit they’d “lost” it. Meanwhile, because they’d taken it out of my account, they charged my Mom their standard fee for when you write an item that gets deposited to another BofA account and it fails to correctly deposit.
It took a total of about 10 days to get them to admit they’d lost the check and then to find it. This, with me calling daily on my end in my state and my Mom finally going daily to her bank in her state. Turns out they’d taken the money out of my account and sent it to Florida — and nobody in Florida had noticed the error.
Worst part? Bank of America wouldn’t reverse ANY of the fees they racked up due to their errors. Not any of mine nor the one they charged my Mom. That was just over $200 in fees. My Mom ended up having to send me another check to deposit. This time, I got the account current, cashed it out and closed it. They just about begged me to keep it open and I flat out told them they’d made all the profit they were going to make off of me by deception. I then walked the about two blocks to my credit union and deposited the money there. It’s where I’ve done all my banking since — and been very happy.
Oh, and the credit union reversed the one fee they charged relating to this fiasco.
