I'm a disabled senior citizen attempting to get by on a $733 a month Social Security stipend. I have also been a Bank of America customer for several years now with my SS checks going directly to the bank.
I have used BofA's free online bill paying service for a couple of years or more, with no problems up until now. This time when I payed my power bill to the Southern California Edison Company, somewhere between the time I sat down to make my little $55.84 payment and the time the bank's comp deliverd the money to SCE it had lost a decimal point and the power company actually received $5584.00.
I got an email this morning (11/7) stating that there was a problem with my online bill pay and to check my internal mail account. On the way through the web site to do this I looked at my payment record and saw immediately what had happened.
I fired off an email immediately telling them that someone has dropped a decimal point somewhere and that the actual amount of the payment was $55.84.
A couple of hours later I got another email with the same information. I replied with the same info I had provided earlier and asked them to please not try to debit my account for the spurious amount again.
I then immediately called customer service and after wading through all the robots, I finally got to a human only to be told that there was nothing to be done about it and that they were going to make three attempts to get their money out of my account before they cancelled the payment and that I would be charged a fee for every attempt.
I told them that I had notified them of the mistake as soon as I got their first email alert (this morning, the payment was made yesterday) and they said too bad but it was an automated system and that they couldn't stop it even if they wanted to and that I would be charged the fees for insufficient funds.
I don't even think I'm the one who left out the decimal point. I have been using the system for a long time and it's never happened before but they refuse to consider that it might have been their mistake and are zeroed in on the over one hundred dollars they intend to collect for what might even have been their own misdeed.
To someone trying to exist of less than $800 a month, $100 skimmed right off the top is devastating. How many other elderly people have made this mistake or worse yet, been caught in a trap of BofA's own making?
All they care about is collecting their fees and sending me 3-5 pieces of junk mail a week trying to sell me 15 different kinds of insurance or get me to accept a subprime predatory credit card.
It's going to cost them a customer of course as I will be closing the account as soon as it's all straightened out and I can be sure they won't be coming after me for something else later, but I seriously doubt they look at little senior citizen accounts like mine as anything significant anyway. I will be going with a local bank that at least pretends to value my business.
One hundred plus dollars (I'm assuming that the fee will be the same as a standard overdraft fee but it may even be more) is almost a month's worth of groceries for someone in my position. It's the co-pays on my cardiac and respiratory system medications. It's gasoline for my car for a month to get my 5 year old grandson the 9 miles to and from Kindergarten every day. It's a hell of a lot of things
But worst of all, they're simply taking money from someone for an honest mistake on their part and then compounding it by not allowing for a correction of the alleged mistake immediately upon discovery, or quite frankly, maybe a not so honest mistake on the bank's part with no chance for any kind of defense or any effort to determine which was actually the case. Either way, Bank of America, the WalMart of the banking industry, is not an institution whose hands the less affluent and the working class in this country need rummaging around in their pockets.
I'd like my hundred bucks back of course but what I'm most interested in is the name of an organization or agency where I might be able to file a legal complaint against BofA.
Tom
Tulare, California
U.S.A.
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