Recently, my wife and I paid our rent with a check. Our landlady didn't think she could cash it, so we sent her an online bill pay check from Washington Mutual. Well, she cashed the original check anyway, so the normal rent payment came out of our account, plus the same amount from the bill pay.
She did not cash the bill pay check (though WAMU takes this money out of the account to reserve it, using Chase bank as a third party aide), and she sent it back to us.
I brought the check to a WAMU branch, where the manager was friendly and did what she could. She said I needed to call the online bill pay department. I did so at the bank branch. It took a little while to work it out, and I complained that, as I had the returned check in my hands, they should be able to deposit the money. (We were in the red and getting more and more overdraft fees.) I was trying to convey that we needed the money back ASAP.
Well, the woman on the phone said that she would put a stop pay on the check, and that it would take 3 to 5 days for the money to be back in our account. We finished our conversation, and when I got off the phone, I let my wife know that it would take that many days for the money to be credited to our account.
As of today, it has been five days. We called WAMU bill pay today, and, at first, they claimed to have no record of the conversation! Then, they found a note from the day I called, claiming that I was in a hurry to get off the phone, that we had been disconnected, and that, because of this, she could not do the stop payment on the check! The call was not disconnected, and when we got off the phone, I was under the impression that the stop pay had been put on the check, and that the refund was coming in 3 to 5 business days.
Meanwhile, WAMU collected more overdraft fees. The online bill pay supervisor would not refund those fees, and she thought there was no reason the employee would have lied in the report. I can think of a few reasons: spite, fraud... Overdraft fees.
The manager at the bank branch itself was able to reverse a total of four overdraft fees: two when I initially came in, and two today when I came in to complain about what the online bill pay department had done.incidentally, the branch manager, too, had been under the impression on the day of the call, that the check was being canceled, and the money rerouted to our account.
Fortunately, we will soon be done with WAMU, but I thought others should know about this.
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