Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Bank Fiasco

Bank Fiasco Well here is the latest on the Bank of America $2,500. debit issue. Ron called the bank to see if anything had been resolved. When I checked our online statement, there was not different other than we still had less money in the checking account and not enough to cover the bills. Thankfully, he was calling collect, because he was transferred four times, by the time I gave up listening or have a breakdown. It seems that though I had called and reported a problem on February 10th and then again on the 14th, there was NO investigation being persued like I was told. Tonight would have been the 7th business day after my call and it was supposed to be resolved by the 5th business day. He repeated the story a dozen times. There was a debit on our account for a returned check from a company we had never heard of who had refused payment on the funds. My on-going line was that if they would just look at the deposits for the last six months, they will see that there was never a deposit. Oh, great thinker-out-of-the-box, you have much to learn. Ron was finally able to speak with someone who took this seriously and so I tuned it yet again when I heard Atlanta, Georgia mentioned. What does this have to do with Atlanta? Our account is in CA. After an hour and 43 minutes on the phone, this is what we found out. Someone went into a Bank of America in Atlanta and presented a check made out to cash. They did not try to deposit the check, but rather they cashed it and walked off with the $2,500.00. What we found from the fraud unit was that they signed Ron's name, but when the CA bank checked the signature against his signature card, they admitted that there was quite a difference. My new line of inquiry was how the hell could any bank cash a check for that amount without any identification, first of all and second of all with the bank branch in CA without doing some checking up first? Well, they did put some ID, supposedly a driver's license number on the back of the check, but it is nothing close to Ron's dl number. We also found that though it is a Bank of America in Atlanta, they are not hooked up to computers with the B of A in CA. Ron said more than once, neither of us have ever been to Atlanta other than the airport and even that has been years ago. The investigation goes on, but in the meanwhile, we are still hankering for our money and the credit cards are crying to be paid. In this day and age, it seems unbelieveable to me that the banks within one giant corporation are not linked with technology to prevent these things from happening. If I had walked into my own branch in CA where people knew me, I would still have been asked for ID before they handed over the cash. This is just craziness, but thankfully, I am compulsive about checking my bank statements and credit card statements to catch these things early. It would be great if I did not have to.

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