Over the past year, Wells Fargo ripped me off for over $120, charging me $10 per month service fee on a savings account that I had to stop contributing to when the economy turned to shit. Evidently I had forgotten some fine print and stupidly didn’t watch an account that I wasn’t making deposits or withdrawals from like a hawk to make sure my bank wasn’t stealing from me. Stupid me.:smack:
I went and bitched to a perfectly nice customer service rep who said it never should have happened, but that they could only refund $20, for whatever reason. :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
Tomorrow I’m off to move accounts to a local credit union. Fuck Wells Fargo and its ‘gotcha’ fees. For the next month or so, my mission in life is to tell everyone I can reach how much they suck.
So, what, you were using the statements for kindling or something? For a whole year?
I mean, nobody should pay a fee for a savings or checking account. (I am continuously baffled by people who claim to have had this experience; I’ve had personal savings and checking accounts with a giant evil recently-owned-by-the-taxpayers bank for decades and never once paid to use them.) But it sounds like you should be more pissed off at yourself for not being on top of your own finances.
I had done a transfer from one bank account to another of $500 USD, the money made it to my account and was there. Three weeks later totally out of the blue the money was gone with this message “REVERSE DEBIT” which kicked my account into the red and then dozens of tiny debit card charges came in and each one racked up the overdraft fee. The account ended up in the red hundreds of dollars for NOTHING, each bank blamed the other for the REVERSE DEBIT and no one could explain why it happened. No one would waive the fees, saying I should get my other bank to pay for it.
To top it all off less than a week later my account was cancelled and sent to collections :mad: And on top of that the other bank said they never got the money so they had no idea what the REVERSE DEBIT thing was. I wasted DAYS on the phone and there was no fucking way I was going to pay that.
You know, I am pissed off at my inattention, but I am pissed off at them MORE. I don’t get a paper statement from them anymore, just an online version that I can go look at, but like a moron, I had the idea that a SAVINGS ACCOUNT was going to be pretty much inactive if I wasn’t doing anything to it, and the paltry-assed, so-called ‘interest’ was something like .02 cents on the dollar.
I’ve heard some version of this from several different people. People cynically chuckling and saying something along the lines of ‘Yeah, they’ll totally screw you if you let them.’ I’m glad for you that you are a total fiscal wiz, and so on top of it. Bully for you. You really want to live in a world of social Darwinism, where anyone who isn’t smart enough not to get ripped off deserves to suffer? I hope you know everything about everything, then.
People, or businesses, who take advantage of someone’s ignorance or inattention are crooks, plain and simple.
You’re doing it wrong. You’re supposed to rob Wells Fargo. They keep all the money in a strong box on the wagon. The drivers are morons though. They always take the road between the two big rocks where you can jump on the wagon, boot them off and drive it away. One bullet will break the lock on the strongbox.
Nah, I’d rather people not get ripped off. On the other hand, that $20 refund would have easily covered two months of inattention. Too bad it went on for a year.
This is typical Wells Fargo behavior. They take advantage of the consumer’s inattention.
They play bait and switch. They will offer an account type on favorable terms. After they stopped offering it, they would ask me every time I did business at the branch whether I wanted to switch to whatever-checking. I would decline. But once I had a moment’s inattention. The rep typed in some letters. Ten seconds later I say, “No! Wait!”. Sorry. My account has been changed. It can’t be changed back. :mad::mad:
That said, their staff is reasonably competent, though not of USAA quality. Just recognize that they are instructed to pick their customer’s pocket to the extent that they can.
It’s statistics. Set enough traps and anybody will fall for them if given enough time. For some that might be 1000 years. For others it might be once every 10 years. Wise consumers should game in a plausible error factor and recognize that Wells Fargo will extract a hefty penalty. Even if you have never bounced a check before, that doesn’t mean you never will. Factor it in.
Yeah, pretty much all the major banks – well, at least Chase and Bank of America, and before that Bank One – do this. I just closed my BoA savings accounts and merged it with my checking account for this reason. I also closed out of a spare Chase checking account for the same reason. It was just becoming too much of a pain in the ass to keep track and make sure all my accounts had the minimum balances in them, and what’s the effing point of a savings account these days anyways, when you make, what, a tenth of a percent interest on them?
BB&T did this to me. They charged me a “nonactivity fee” because I wasn’t using the account enough. What kind of sense does that make? So I closed it and took my business to PNC, who’s never screwed me in all my years with them. Wonderful company, I tell you.
I just learned yesterday that I can go into my local branch early in the morning, withdraw cash from one account, deposit the cash into another account at the same bank, and still not have the deposit credited to the second account until the following day. I was tempted to close all of my accounts there on principle alone, but, judging from the websites of the handful of other banks with branches close to me, this is now a standard practice. Ridiculous.
Not to mention the transaction yesterday arose after the bank froze all of my checking accounts (3 business and one personal) earlier this week because a third-party check I deposited in one of them last week bounced, apparently creating a “fraud risk.” Took two days to sort it all out.
So I’m all on board with the “fuck the banks” mentality right now.
I don’t know about Wells Fargo, but another big bank gave me the impression that its view was: “Anyone stupid enough to retain their account with us instead of alternatives is so stupid we should screw them any way we can.”
For example, I read that some banks’ software sorts daily checks by decreasing size. That way, if you’re overdrawing, they can charge the overdraft fee on a maximal number of checks.
Big banks may treat their employees no better than their retail customers. Many tellers worked 19-hour weeks, or whatever the maximum is that allows the employer to deny benefits.
Yeah, I got nailed with that in '03 with Chase. Anyhow, the banking reforms of three or four years ago put an end to this practice, so far as I know. Also, withdrawals were processed before deposits.
I was with Wachovia back when it was First Union Bank. When Wells Fargo bought out Wachovia, in the nicest way possible, I told them to go suck me. I couldn’t be more delighted with my credit union and actually feel like I have more money… because I do! Better interest rates on savings, no checking/savings fees, and the people are, actual people. No customer service from Hydrabad.
And my loathing for Wells Fargo comes nowhere near my seething, white-hot hatred for Bank of America who babysat a second mortgage for about a year. I was so glad when Fly-By-Night Mortgage Loan Management Company• bought them out, I thanked them repeatedly for buying my loan.
I had been banking with ING Direct because they owned Sharebuilder, and I liked the convenience of the easy transfer of cash to my brokerage account. Then I started trading at Schwab, and found it more convenient to just move everything to Schwab and left the ING account emptied but active. ING was subsequently bought by Capital One (ISTR).
Then I read at the Dope how banks are now dinging inactive bank accounts with fees and the first thing the depositor knows about it is that he starts getting mail from a collection agency. Horrified, I promptly called ING and spoke with a representative about closing that old account.
He asked why and I outlined my fears. He said “Oh, Capital One has no plans to make changes to the way ING did business.”
I said, well that just may be, but next week your CFGO (Chief Fee Generation Officer) who came over from CapOne will decide to take up this dinging practice and the next thing I know my credit rating’s ruined.
He uncomfortably cleared his throat and then went ahead and formally closed my account. That is, I hope he did and he didn’t just pull some maneuver where it’s technically still open and vulnerable to the next crook ploy that the banks want to pull.
I know a couple of online banks that don’t dick you for having an idle account, but still, if you don’t watch statements, you’ll eventually get dicked by somebody somewhere.
Corporations are amoral. If we accept that they are legally persons, they fit the definition of a sociopath.
