I used to love banking with SunTrust. I recommended them to all of my friends and family. I wish this could have gone differently, but now I am forced to close my accounts with them and look for another bank.
When I moved back to NC from NJ, I had to find a new bank. At the time the closest bank was in Virginia. I decided to go with SunTrust. When I opened the account, I got the SunTrust at Work Solid checking account. There were supposed to be no maintenance fees because of my employer. Well, all was fine until November, when they started taking $17 a month out for maintenance fees. I use my checkbook register religiously and never checked my account online or anything. I did not notice the missing money until September, when I got an insufficient funds notice in the mail after I wrote a check for my electricity. My account was at $-1.37 when I should have had almost $186 in it. I went to my branch, and they informed me that they sent out letters in October but not everyone got one. They would not give me my money back, but they reversed the NSF fee. He changed my account to the regular SunTrust at Work account so that my direct deposit would have the maintenance fees waived.
Then, a little before Christmas, I became a victim of fraud. I checked my account and noticed a check for $30 had been cashed. I had not written a check in months. So I went online and saw that the check was obviously fake. It did not have my signature, nor was it endorsed on the back. I called the SunTrust fraud report line. I asked the woman what I should do from there, and she told me it would be best to "hard close" the account and reopen a new one. When I got the new account number, I should call them back, and they would refund me the $30 fake check to the new account.
On Dec. 27th I tried to close the account, but the bank told me that they could not close it because there was a pending transaction. Someone had used my card at a Redbox that morning. I am the only one with a card to the account, and I have never used a Redbox. He told me he would put a block on the account, so that only money could be deposited and not withdrawn. He said the Redbox transaction would still go through and I could close the account and dispute the charge later. He took my debit card so he could shred it and ordered me a new one.
The next day I looked online and saw that the transaction had gone through and my paycheck had been deposited. I immediately went to the branch to have the account closed. The woman told me that she saw I had a block on the account, and then she hard closed my account and helped me open a new one. She transferred my money over to the new account and was very helpful. I looked online and saw that my account was no longer on the site for me to look at, and I thought everything was good.
A few days later I got my new card in the mail and activated it. When I tried to use it, it kept getting declined. So I called customer service, and she said it was still connected to the old account and switched it to the new account. I remembered that I was supposed to have the money refunded to my new account, and I was connected with the fraud report line.
The woman told me that the $30 had already been deposited BACK INTO MY OLD ACCOUNT. I told her I had closed that account. She said it was still open and that it was at -$257 and the $30 had been deposited there to try to make the account positive again. She told me that the account could not have been closed on the 28th because the Redbox transaction was still pending and did not go through until the 31st. She told me there had been more withdrawals since then. I said there should not have been, because there was supposed to be a block on the account. She said there never was one, and I basically had to deposit money into the account to make it positive so that I could try to close it again.
I told her that I do not even have access to the account anymore since I tried closing it. She said I had to go to the branch. She was extremely rude and acted like I was lying. I decided I was going to act like I did not know the account was not closed and continue on with my life. Besides, if I had not wanted the $30, I would never have known.
Then I got mail from them saying that my account was now in the negative 350s and I needed to give them money to bring it back into the positive. I also got more NSF notices about different transactions they paid on my behalf. Why on earth would you approve more withdrawals when the account was already way overdrawn??? I took all my money out of my new SunTrust account, and I plan on closing it (if I even get that done), because a friend told me that they will go into my other SunTrust accounts to make the old one positive.
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