Bank One is the DEVIL !

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I think somebody posted a thread not too long ago about their crappy bank, but I feel the need to weigh in with my mundane, pointless banking experience.

I was with a local bank until they got taken over by the semi-monopoly Bank One. I considered changing banks immediately based on the experiences of a friend, a poor college student, who was mistakenly told by Bank One that his account was overdrawn by $7 million.

So anyway, I figured I might as well stay with Bank One because of they have ATM’s everywhere and if you use their ATM to withdraw money from an account at another bank they charge you a whopping $2.25.

Well so far I’ve put up with a year or so of $10 “service charges” every month because my balance was under $800. It pissed me off, but not enough to change banks.

Two months ago I noticed that the screen at the ATM said “Pay bills online. Get $25!”
Hey, good deal right? This bank might not be so bad after all. I signed up and didn’t get a penny. I called customer service and asked where the hell my $25 was. Lady said it would take 90 days and that it said it would take 90 days on the ATM screen that I saw. I
drove down to the bank and confirmed that it said no such thing.

This was lie #1.

So I call them back and they say, well it says on the website that it takes 90 days. However I was unable to find any page on the site that said anything like that.

That was lie #2.

I found an advertisement for the online bill paying with one of my bank statements that said “Sign up before Nov 7, and $25 will be depositted into your account between 11/9 and 12/10.” I had signed up on 11/2.

This was lie #3, since today is 12/11 and I haven’t seen one red cent.

I called up this morning and was told that lots of people had signed up for this service and it would take a while to get the money.

“The ad says between 11/9 and 12/10,” I said incredulously, “You’ve already HAD time!”

Also I pointed out that since this stuff was all done by computer, it could all be automatic, and shouldn’t take more than two minutes to give everyone their $25.

Customer service didn’t have an answer for this, but they assured me I’d get my $25, only they weren’t quite sure when that would happen.

3 strikes, Bank One, YER OUTTA THERE!

As soon as I get my money I’m closing my account and going with a nice local bank. Yeah they only have one ATM in town, but there’s no minimum balance fee, free checking, and the satisfaction that I’m not giving my money to lying crooks.

I know Bank One has branches in several states. Anyone else have any problems with them?

2

The only problem we’ve ever had with them is that we are supposed to get free checking because of some deal they have with my husband’s employer (if you have your pay check direct deposited, that is) Most months this works, but every now and then, they sneak in a monthly charge. We usually call them up and have our account reimbursed, which they have been good about doing within a day or two. It’s only happened three times in the last two years, but it’s still frustrating. We got a free copy of Money 98 from them to use their online banking, which I just love. It’s so convenient.

I guess you wanted bad stories about Bank One, but I’ve been using that bank for three years now and I really haven’t had any problems with them.

Shadowfox
“We are what we pretend to be.”

  • Kurt Vonnegut
3

Bank One once completely mishandled my husband’s direct deposit! He and his sister worked for different companies, but had direct deposit, and both used bank one…

So one payday my husband checks his balance and finds that his “check” has never hit the bank - he tells his HR dept, they check in to it, and assure him it has been deposited. He checks his balance again - it’s not there - HR calls Bank One AGAIN and verifies the deposit - basically then tells my husband he needs to straighten it out with the bank - Bank one tells him there has been no such deposit an he needs to work it out with his company.

About a week or so later my then 15 year old sister-in-law pulls me aside after a family dinner and whispers, “What do you do when the bank accidently credits your CHECKING account an extra 900 dollars?” My response was - You tell your brother you found his paycheck…

In short - same last name - that was all they had in common and BankOne apparently didn’t bother with account numbers or full name or anything - they just put the deposit in the first account witht hat last name, which fortunately is not too common. What really burnt my biscuits was that they twice verified the deposit from my husbands employer!

I hate them.

4

I made the mistake of getting a VISA from Bank One and then loosing my job. By the time I could get unemployment, which my previous employer fought, then lost, I had run out of funds and used the VISA to support myself. THEN I discovered that cash advances have a different rate of interest in comparison to charges and cash advances come off of the bill LAST, so you get to pay all of that additional interest until you pay up your balance. (I didn’t see that in the microscopic print on the application form.)

Since I had fallen behind and maxed out my card by the time I got my unemployment and, later, another job, they socked me with monthly late payment fees even when I made a partial payment on time. (My monthly payment had jumped from $90 a month to $345, like I was going to make THAT on $400 a month unemployment!) I would sometimes send in $100 and discover that $90 of it went into interest and penalties and $10 went to principal! I spent weeks haggling with them on the phone, threatening to file chapter 13, until they finally agreed to drop the interest and let me catch up, which I did. Now I pay $90 a month and only $40goes into interest. Once this card is paid up, it is getting replaced! A boss of mine used Bank One to pay me when I was a delivery girl out of his business account in his home town, 40 miles away from me. I could easily cash my check at the main branch in my town BUT I tried to cash it at a smaller office across town and they REFUSED to take it. They said they could not verify the account because the computers were down even though I had cashed checks there before!

Another rotten bank is Riverside National. A friend of mine used it for years when he was working and making good money. Then he got disabled and could no longer deposit those fat paychecks. Being somewhat absent minded, he used to bounce checks now and then and the bank would call him up and give him an opportunity to deposit more money before they charged him the usual fee. (Back then, $5.) Plus they honored the check. Well, within months of his big deposits cutting down, they stopped calling when that happened, increased his handling fee from $5 a month to $9 and the check charge went up to $24.95. They sent his notice to him in the mail, which usually arrived the next day. THAT interval got longer and longer until his notices started arriving a week after the check bounced, which gave it time to be resubmitted and bounce again. THAT way he not only, on, say a $10 check, accumulated two $24.95 charges ($49.90) BUT got charged $20 by the payee. The total wound up being $69.90 on a $10 bounced check, which made other checks bounce. One time half of his disability check was sucked up by the bank for bounced check charges because of such an incident. When he tried to talk to them about it, including his disability, they were firm in their attitude. They would NOT stop the charges, they denied that he was being treated any differently from when he was a large depositor and were actually somewhat rude to him but they did stop bouncing so many. (He has a memory problem and forgets what he has in the bank.) I had to handle his money for a while and made the bank change his account over to a no-load one with no monthly fees. (Even though they KNEW he was disabled, they never suggested his changing from his regular account – which charged him not only 25 cents per check for any check cashed over the 10 free ones, BUT added in the $9.00 service charge! One time his additional charges came to $20! I stopped that!)

I also had him switch his accounts to another bank, one which doesn’t fuck him over for every friggin’ nickel and dime they can get.

5

I think this is pretty much SOP for credit cards, no? I’ve never taken a cash advance on my cards, mainly because I was under the impression you’re ALWAYS gouged for them.

I would like to bitch about Wells Fargo for a minute. Their ATM once ate my paycheck, and it took ten days and five phone calls to HQ for them to sort it out. When the same thing had happened to me six years earlier at Citizens Bank (Maryland), they opened up the machine, retrieved my check, and manually entered the deposit into my account within the hour. Service just ain’t what it used to be.

6

Oh goody, a chance to post the final resolution of my problems with my then-unnamed bank, which I will now name: It’s California Federal.

As some of you may or may not recall, my bank put three fraudulent charges through my account. They then stalled on doing the research, refusing to credit the account because they couldn’t “verify” what happened. Two weeks later (after a brief interval in which they lost my paycheck for 24 hours) they finally told me that they had accidentally put three “badly damaged” checks through my account that had actually belonged to a customer with a similar name. They finally credited the money to my account and sent a letter of apology repeating the story about the damaged checks, signed by the bank manager. So I thought, “OK, they’re all completely incompetent,” and closed my accounts in relief.

Then I got my final statement on the account. And enclosed with my statement and my own checks were three other checks. With someone else’s name on them – same last name, similar first name. Whole, undamaged and perfectly legible checks with (and this is the interesting part) my account number on them. Cal Fed had decided to lie about it rather than tell me they let forged checks go through my account. And they went through this whole elaborate cover-up and series of lies – not one single person there ever told me the truth – even they even committed to the lies in writing. Then sent me the proof that they’d been lying. Madness.

So I’ve sent off letters, with copies of all the documentation, to the regulatory agencies just because the whole experience was so damn weird. And all the lies, coverups and dramas were over less than $500.00

Catrandom