On August 16th I found a suspicious debit on one of our 35 business bank accounts. I went through other statements and found that these charges had gone back 11 months and totaled $14,762.77 in fraudulent charges! These included one bank draft and ten ACH debits from this account.
We called our Bank to see how they could allow such acts to take place. We were told that you can only dispute charges within 60 days of the transaction. We were able to refuse the last two transactions of $1,952.75. The Bank had us sign an Affidavit of Unauthorized ACH Debit Activity.
Now we still have $12,809.96 of outstanding debits Nextel fraudulently took from our account! We contacted Nextel and were told a fraud ticket would be opened and we would be contacted shortly. I was told that since this wasn't a credit card fraud, I couldn't be helped and they couldn't stop this person from charging our account. Nextel says they have a signed agreement from this person and the checking account is theirs and if there was a problem with the debits we should have caught these charges sooner.
We called our fraud division at our Bank, again. We were told the same thing, you should have caught this sooner and the bank can only go back 60 days. We called the Carpentersville police. A Detective contacted us and told us that he would go in front of the Kane County Grand Jury and get a subpoena for the Nextel records. This subpoena was obtained on September 3rd, which required Nextel to comply no later then September 27th. The detective contacted Nextel on September 20th to get an update and was told that they never received the subpoena and to please refax it. We are still waiting on the information requested in this subpoena (today is Oct 18th).
We also filed a lawsuit against Nextel on September 16th. Our Attorney called us shortly after to let us know that Nextel verbally agreed to pay us back our money and they would go after their customer for the charges, since it was fraudulent to use our bank account. Two and a half weeks went by and our attorney never received any written response from Nextel's legal department. As of last week, Nextel now refuses to restore our money.
This company now knows it took our money fraudulently and now refuses to restore our funds! They are now knowingly perpetrating fraud, which I believe is conspiracy and probably engaging in racketeering. This corporate philosophy of profiting through fraudulent practices must be stopped now!
We need to hear from other people in this similar situation to proceed with a class action lawsuit. Please contact my office at [email protected] with your story or information.
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