Last week, the Bank of America (BOA) allowed some criminal in Florida to steal $3,000.00 from my checking account. The woman used a fake driver's license with my wife's name on it. The driver ID number on the license was incorrect and the signature did not even remotely resemble my wife's signature on file with the bank. When we called the bank, they said they would have to "freeze" the account for security reasons.in doing this, BOA decided to artificially and falsely reflect the fact that the account was "overdrawn" nearly a million dollars. At the time they did this, we had several checks outstanding and automatic bill payment services scheduled.
We asked that the bank cover the checks that were outstanding and they said they would not pay the checks even though after the $3,000.00 larceny there were ample funds in the account to cover the checks and anticipated debits for our bills. Over our objection, they "overdrew" our account. During this process, my wife had several phone calls with various people at the bank. She explained that she did not want the payees of our checks to think we wrote bad checks or that we had insufficient funds in the bank to cover our obligations.in New York, it is a crime to write a bad check. As is customary, my wife's conversations with the bank employees were memorialized in BOA's computer system under our account.
Sure enough, BOA bounced several of our checks and refused to pay the scheduled debits for our bills.in doing so, the people we do business with were left with the false impression that my wife and I were having financial problems, committed a crime, had insufficient funds and were otherwise simply not credit worthy.
After checks were dishonored, my wife went to our local branch and sat down with the branch manager. She explained the situation and the manager got corporate on the phone. When my wife indicated that she was contemplating suing BOA (she has been a customer for over 20 years), the woman in corporate said she was going to delete all of the conversation notes on file attached to her account. Shortly after the conversation ended, the branch manager checked our account and sure enough, the notes were no longer there.
Apparently, falsely overdrawing a depositor's account is BOA's policy measure to deal with preventing future fraud in the face of prior fraudulent activity. However, the fraud and larceny in our case was caused directly by BOA's negligence in failing to safeguard our funds. The woman in Florida was only able to make a counter withdrawal of $3,000.00 because the validity of her identification was not scrutinized by BOA employees. Certainly, BOA could have closed or frozen our account and even refused to pay the outstanding checks for security measures but they should be obligated to tell the payees the correct reason for it - that our account was compromised because of BOA's ineptitude.instead, in order to preserve their business reputation, they lied, told the people we do business with that we are essentially deadbeats and completely mislead the public recipients of our checks.
On top of it all, they charged us $35.00 for every bad check!!!
So, now I am filing a defamation lawsuit against BOA. My wife and I are both attorneys. I believe BOA's policy is a deceptive business practice and that they are systematically defaming their customers in order to conceal the fact that your money is not safe at their institution. If you have had a similar experience, please contact me. 914-xxx-xxxx.
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