Now, I really hate to post negative things. I really do. But this has been in the works for years about this particular bank. It's a very long story but it needs telling, if anything, to get it off my shoulders.
Bank of America, many years ago, back when I lived in Vegas, I got an account with them. Bank of "America", how can you go wrong? Right? WRONG!
At the time however, they were great! I can't complain about them at all.
Like many Americans, I got credit cards. Now my dad always fussed at me about it. He never had a single credit card all of his life. He hated the credit cards and he thought debit cards were stupid. Why you would want to stand in line to get your money when you can just go right into the bank with a check and write out what you want and they would give you the money right out of your account. He thought the cards were a dangerous thing, and a very bad idea. It was cash over the barrel or you got "payments on time" or you just didn't get it. He hated that I had credit cards and knew it was far too easy to get into trouble with them. How right he was! Because sure enough, I did, like many others, I got into debt and ended up with way too many cards with too high of an interest rate. Part of the downfall was yes, me being stupid and living beyond my means. Plus, my son's medical bills and things happening with the car like the a/c going out in my car while living in FL and well, you can't survive too well down there without it. And on top of all of that, I had to take a 13k loss on my home and the only way I could pay the bank that much was credit card cash withdrawals. Oh now that's such a bad move and let me tell you, it is nasty for the interest you are charged is outrageous!
So I was in a big mess by the time I got to Vegas.
But, Bank of America was there for me. I thank them for this. They came out with this special 50k line of credit, no questions asked, yadda yadda type of deal. Guaranteed interest of 8.5% for the life of the loan, etc etc and when I saw this, I knew I could get rid of all of my high interest credit cards!
So I signed up. They charged me 1k or so for processing...ahem....the start of it all....
but I didn't care a whole lot at the time (silly me!) because all I saw was all that interest I was not going to have to pay the other cards. But the whole deal was, I had to make my payments and I could not be late, not one time or else the interest rate would jack up to 26.99 or 29.99%. Holy crap right?
So I made SURE that I would never be late and I had the money withdrawn automatically each month and in fact, I paid them more than I needed to. My payments were 734 a month so I paid 1k a month. Yup, that's nasty, but I had a lot of credit cards (see 13k in debt from the loss of the house alone). But I made sure I would never ever be late. And for a few years, everything went well, everyone was happy...
Until....
I moved to Texas, continued with my payments and then, someone stole a check out of my mailbox, (an automatic felony for tampering with the mail) and they stole my routing number and account number off the check and duplicated a few blank checks and went down to a Walmart in White Settlement, TX (on the other side of Ft Worth from me) and this dude thought to buy himself a shiny new computer. Then he made a mistake and went over to the jewelry counter 5 minutes later and tried to buy himself some expensive jewelry.
Walmart denied his check. THANK YOU WALMART!
I thought I had blogged of this before, but don't see the post, so I'll explain now what happened and later, I'll make a blog post of what to do should you find your identity is stolen or a check or something like that. And I'll keep this short without pulling my file to go into too many details about this situation...
I had been saving some money in my checking account to pay Home Depot for the gutters they were installing on my house. I looked into the bank account online as I tend to do now and then and all of a sudden I saw my money was gone! I realized what had happened and saw pending this huge check for Walmart written just the day before!
Now, what flags this even more is that whenever I have gone to Walmart, I never ever use a check. I just don't carry checks with me, they are used only for bills. I always use my debit card at Walmart.
I knew if this check cleared my account, my other checks that were out, were going to bounce sky high! So I went to my bank to stop payment on that check that was still pending. To stop it in its tracks. Bank of America would not do that. They told me I had to let it clear. I was upset. They told me not to worry that any overdraft fees would all be returned to me eventually but I couldn't close the account out, I had to let it happen.
OK, I felt this was WRONG. They should have been able to reject the payment as it was PENDING. It would be different if it had cleared but if it's still pending, then I felt they could have disapproved it, denied it or whatever and stopped it, but nope.
So then, the lady I spoke to at the bank told me I shouldn't bother to file a police report. HUH?!
Yea....NOT!
Both of my parents were dispatchers for the police and so I knew that was wrong. Whether they catch the guy or not, I still had to file a report! It's wrong what happened and they need to know about it.
Well, I thought I could go locally to the police but no, they sent me to the police dept that the Walmart in question was under their jurisdiction. Well that took getting out my Sherlock Holmes hat to figure out what Walmart it was as the number listed on my online statement was to a Walmart that no longer existed! DOH!
I finally figured it out however and notified Walmart and they pulled the video tape and reviewed it with me on the phone and said yup, they could see the guy, described him to me and what he bought even! They made a copy of the video and told me to let the police detective know they had it if they wanted to come by and pick it up!! WOW! Good for Walmart again!
Bank of America did notify their upper management as to what was going on and put a hold on the account after the check cleared.
I contacted the Credit Bureau and reported the whole thing and then went down to White Settlement police dept and filed the report with the detective there.
I created a whole file of this entire mess. (smart move!) I documented everything!
The detective advised me to never ever mail your bills in a mailbox at your door. Putting the flag up is like a red flag to the criminals that you have checks in there too. Also to not ever mail your bills in any of the blue mailboxes as they too could be broken into. The only place safe is if we go into a post office and either slip the mail into the wall slot for outgoing mail or hand it directly to the teller.
It took me 3 months to get my money back. For 3 months my money was held hostage but it all finally got sorted out and yes, Bank of America returned to me all overdraft fees. Walmart returned the money seeing that yes, I had not ever used a check with them and telling me because I used a Debit card all the time, that was what saved me. Tho' later I found out they blackballed my account with them?? Such crap!
But the moment all my checks cleared however, I closed the checking account with Bank of America.
I closed ALL my accounts with Bank of America, except for the line of credit that I could not close out at the time. At one point they tried to make me keep a checking account because I had a line of credit but then they changed their stance and let it be.
I went straight over to Bank of Texas who were all too happy to have my account. So I just continued to pay Bank of America by either transfer or check.
And everything went well for a while......
Until....
No comments:
Post a Comment