One of the banks I use sent me a “congratulations” letter wishing me happiness in my new marriage. The problem is, I didn’t get married.
The letter was nominally from a manager, but in all likelyhood was automatically generated by the computer based on (incorrectly entered or parsed) criteria.
I contacted a CSR Drone and they sent a weaseley, generic letter about how important customer satisfaction is without any explanation for how this happened or what they are going to do about it to prevent it happening again, probably a form letter that the guy just clicked a button to send.
Are you mortally offended or something? Why does it matter? As long as you can ascertain that they didn’t make a mistake (like merging your bank account with the person they think you married) then there’s no problem worth thinking about for more than 2 seconds. Someone probably just fat-fingered an account number. Whoopee. Mistakes happen.
Seriously, you are considering closing an account over this? Is your life so uneventful that a minor mistake causes you to go into full 40 alarm red alert super seriously offended status?
I’ve thought about whether or not I’ve has a status update in The Database. I haven’t noticed anything odd about my statements or my online account access, and no “spouse’s name” has appeared on anything. Perhaps a gentlemanly inquiry to make sure that no update was done, or that if one was done, that it was voided, would be in order?
Personally, I’d call.
Chances are that it means nothing. But clearly there is something unknown in the system. Why assume it’s the only unknown? A simple phone call may clear it up.
It’s possible that someone with a similar name did get married, and they’re annoyed because the bank didn’t congratulate them!
I would suggest maybe checking your credit report just to be sure that no weird stuff is going on elsewhere.
It is hard for me to believe so many would just blow this off in the era of stolen identities, etc.
I’d definitely check it out with the bank to make sure nothing dodgy was happening with my accounts, but I certainly wouldn’t be looking to cause a fuss or cancel my accounts, that sounds way over the top.
If you call the bank, don’t call the number on the letter, look it up and ask them that way. The worst I would think is some sort of phishing scam, where a Nigerian sends a letter, you get all WTF and call them for an explanation. They (naturally) would ask for all kinds of info about you to ‘verify’ your account.
Realistically though I’d shred it and throw it away if none of my accounts looked amiss.
Chances are low I would have even seen it. I usually open and make sure as best I can that it isn’t too important and then toss it. (Sometimes that gets me into trouble.)
Had I seen it, I would have tossed it. I often struggle to take action on the import things, so this would have been way too much work.
The letter sounds like a form letter than gets sent when someone changes their name on the account because of marriage. I’d check the account, but it sounds like the bank screwed up and mistakenly sent out a bunch of form letters. I wouldn’t make a fuss, I’d rather deal with the devil I know that the devil I don’t.
I wouldn’t be offended. I’d think most of the time its down to innocent human error somewhere in their system. However as sandra_nz and others have said I’d call them up to make sure nothing like identity theft was going on.
