To make a long story as short as possible, I registered online with my bank - bank one - to pay bills online through billpay. This took place on january 31st. After inputting all my payee info, i decided that the wait period of 10 days was too much, i could pay bills faster than that thru regular mail. I cancelled my online bill payment services on february 2nd, and went ahead and paid my bills as i normally do.
I have a target guest card AKA retailers national bank. Since i had to do some shopping at target anyway, i decieded instead of mailing my bill in, i would pay it in the store. Yesterday (feb 4) i paid off the remaining balance of my target card ($201.10) which was the same amount i had scheduled to be paid thru my bank online. Well today, i find out that thru some bank error, my online bill payment went thru instead of being cancelled. This meant that target now had 2 payments of $201.10.
I just got off the phone with my bank, and they admitted their error, and also helped me stop other payments to companies i had already paid since cancelling my online payments. The problem was, the two payments to target had already posted. This had caused my account to go into overdraft because of the two amounts that target had taken. Ok, so at this point, target has done nothing wrong.
Heres where the problem is. The guy i spoke with at my bank, advised me to call target and have them refund one of my payments. He said they should do this easily since the payment of $201.10 paid off the balance of my card. (my card now has an an available balance of over $400 and my original limit on the card was only $200) well, i called target and explained the situation. The first guy i spoke to said he didnt have authorization to refund any kind of payment, so he transferred me to his manager who transferred me to an online services rep who transferred me back to the card services number i had originally called.
Every rep and manager i spoke with told me the same thing. They didnt know how to make a refund. So now im stuck with a target card that has $200 extra on it, and other bills that arent going to go through because of my overdraft.
These people dont know how to do their job, and they dont care. They are not the ones who are stressing over checks that will bounce because they were overpaid. As long as they have thier money they dont care. I bet they would have done something real quick if i had overpaid my other credit card and was unable to pay them.
The lesson i have learned through all this is that change is not good, and online payments are not easier, but crappier. Just because you have no control over your money once you have entered your info.
Yes, the problem started with bank one, but they did all in their power to fix it. These two target payments were out of their hands, but target did nothing to even try to fix it or help me out.
Stay away from omline payments and target guest cards!!!
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