It probably says something about Bank of America that my first reaction on reading the thread title was, “I wonder which thread got bumped, and why?”
Oh. It’s a yet another new one.
That’s not to protect you, that’s to protect them. You’re only liable for like 50 or 100 dollars on a stolen card. Wait till they proactively freeze it when you’re on vacation in a foreign country.
If you are going to travel abroad you are supposed to give them your itinerary so they’ll know.
I actually got off a cruise ship in Costa Rica and used my card at a taco stand. Apparently within hours that number was being used to buy large screen tvs all across S. America. They froze my card and had a new one waiting for me at the cruise ship the next day.
Says who? I find no such instructions in my paperwork.
Well, good. I’d stick with that card. Of course, they notified you that your card was frozen and they’d have a new one for you the next day, I assume. Before you tried to use it for dinner in Paris, and to check out from your hotel in Paris, and to get on the train to Milan, and check into the hotel in Milan.
Didn’t work for me. I had a basic plain jane Bank of America checking account and ATM card. Maybe has $800 or so in it. Wife had a fancy premium Bank of America checking account with their premium ATM card since she had a bit over $10K in it. We went to Croatia, where my card worked but hers did not (despite both of us calling and informing them of the expected locations where we planned on using the cards). Bad news was that $800 wasn’t going to be enough for what we planned.
On the bright side, I called BoA and the bottom line was that there was no way they could make her card work. After about 45 minutes I convinced them to transfer $5k from her account to mine. Luckily my wife was able to give them enough information to give them a pretty good idea she was who she said she was. And when I got back home, I even got them to reimburse me for the $20 or so phone bill for the call. So yeah they kinda suck, but they did come through.
They still sing folk songs about it in El Salvador, but due to linguistic gender confusion, he is referred to as La Scylla and praised for a bounteous bosom.
Bank of America makes me all stabby.
They locked my credit card account nearly every time I ever tried to use the damn thing. Not just once, but many times.
This last time I received an email about purchases from a new business (admittedly out of the country) which told me to log on and verify my identity and purchases. So I went online and jumped through all their hoops like a good little puppy only to be told I couldn’t be verified online. So great, I called them up on the phone and answered some of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard. What was my last address? I’ve been at my current one fifteen years-I don’t really remember the exact address. What interstate was closest to the address I can’t really remember??? Really? What the hell does that prove? What email address did I use when I opened the account? That was longer ago than my last apartment. Hell if I know-I’ve had umpteen email addresses since then.
Anyway I finally proved I was me and that I had actually purchased goods from the business in question so they reactivated my card. Yay.
Until the very next time I made a purchase from the SAME BUSINESS they locked it again! So I canceled the sucker. Good riddance.
BofA’s screwing up royally? Wonderful. They’re the folks who have the on-base banking contract for the US bases overseas.
My mom and I both banked there for a little while. Not only did I not know I was in the hole, but they actually took money out of my mom’s account to pay for it, meaning she wound up being overdrawn. And because she uses her checkbook more often than I did, she wound up overdrawn more than I was. Since this was right after they’d moved from First Federal, where someone stole $200 out of their account, and later Arvest screwed them over, my parents went a long time without even bothering to have a bank account.
Mitchell and Webb are not that far off…
Thanks to you, coffee just came out of my nose and now I have to change clothes before leaving for work…It was worth it though ! Thanks for the laugh!
It’s been featured prominently in most of the paperwork I’ve gotten with both my cards, in my monthly statements, when I look at my account online. It is ubiquitous and on a par with that statement about how Bac representatives will never call and ask you for your account number.
I really can’t explain how you missed it. It’s one of those things that “everybody knows.”
Since Bac bought so many card companies, maybe you have dome shitty legacy card that doesn’t give a shit about you.
This is not a ringing endorsement for Bank of America.
So you did get some then? Was that, at least, a biggie? 
Ahhhh, pretty much same as here?
I have a BoA complaint and I am not even a BoA customer in any way. For about three months now we have been getting collection calls from BoA for some guy whose only connection to us seems to be that we share one of the most common last names in America. We have told them multiple times that we have no connection to this guy and from what we can find out none of his contact information matches us in any way, so it is not even that he fraudulently used our address or phone number on his accounts. Every time we explain this and everytime the promise to fix it and then we get another call from another drone.
Thank you Caja Madrid and La Caixa, because even at your most stupid all I have had to do re. my frequent travel abroad is say “I travel abroad a lot”. They’ve told me to let them know in advance please if I’m going to China, and they’ll give me a temporary card to use instead of mine (CAN did that for Littlebro as well).
My travels abroad tend to be of the “jump through three countries in a week with 24h warning” kind.
And then they don’t make any effort to contact you.
Actually I’ve never run into that issue with my BofA card, because I just don’t use it that much.
But with several other banks, I’ve used my card for something unusual - and they’ve FROZEN it without notifying me. So I’m out and about and shopping and “DECLINED - CONTACT BANK”.
So I call the bank (Shitibank, I believe this was), they explained it was for my protection because of the earlier unusual transaction, and said flat-out that they do NOT contact the cardholder. Fuck? the? what??? This happened twice, and it cost them my business.
To be fair, the transactions in both cases were highly unusual (ordering from an overseas vendor, shipping an item to a friend in that country) and SHOULD have been flagged - but the bank really needs to contact the cardholder in that situation.
Of course Chase hasn’t been that much better. I tried to order something online - renewal of my AVG software I think - and it was declined. Chase sent me a text message asking me if it was legit. I think I just needed to reply to the text message to fix it (though I’d already taken care of it on the phone).
The next time it happened, they did NOT bother to send me a message. Sheesh.
Speaking of Chase, they need to change their corporate name. There’s no easy obvious disparaging version, unlike Shitibank or Crapital One. :D.
I hate BOA. A year and a half ago I went online to pay my credit card bill and clicked the wrong account on accident so it tried to draft a payment from an incorrect account. I realized it immediately and called them to say hey, this was an error, please don’t try to draft anything from that closed account but it was too late. They shut down my access to online payments and despite more than a dozen calls in 18 months they still haven’t managed to figure out how to correct it so that I can use the online payment feature. I can’t really cancel the card as it is my oldest account by several years so it would negatively impact my credit score to do so but I haven’t used the card for more than emergency purposes since the whole kerfluffle and I made my husband switch to Chase with me once we got our joint account set up because I wasn’t willing to deal with their stupid bullshit online any longer.
Chaos Bank. There you go.
I have major ideological problems with BoA’s tendency to debit all of the day’s withdrawals before crediting all the day’s deposits. I bank with Chase, and when my check is direct deposited at 3am Friday morning, I can start spending it the same day. With BoA I wouldn’t be able to do that without multiple overdraft fees (despite the fact that the money was really there all day, you corporate fuckbags). Bullcocky!
Never had a BoA account, but I figured it was a good time to pile on :v
In keeping with your theme, I’d suggest the German word Scheisse - Wiktionary, the free dictionary