Bank of America

No stars and it doesn’t matter which branch. they all have the same policy. If you have a mortgage question you need to make an appt. Their customer service
line constantly asks you for your mortgage payment no matter what question you are asking. they also tell you they can put you in collection. Think about it. They can get rid of you but you can’t get rid of them without costly refinacing.

I like Bank of America’s online banking website for the most part. I check my statements daily for any changes to my account that I did not authorize.
In late March, I noticed a pending transaction for an e-​check to Verizon Wireless. I don’t have a Verizon account anymore, so I called up the bank’s general customer service number to cancel the pending transaction. The person on the phone assured me that the transaction would not post up my account after a lengthy wait.
I checked my account the next day, and sure enough, the transaction had posted to my account. Again, I was on the phone with the bank’s customer service number for a long time, and this time, I was told that I had to file a claim, there would be a hold placed on my account, and that I needed to close that account and open up a new one. Sounds easy enough, right?
Wrong.
I went to this banking center and spent over 2 hours trying to get the money out of the account that had a hold placed on it. When a hold is placed on your account, a very large negative value is placed as a balance on the account. The associate at the bank could not get the hold cleared by himself, so he had to call the bank’s customer service number. After 6 – 7 different transfers to different customer service representatives, the hold was only partially cleared.
You see, when you assign a large negative balance to an account with overdraft protection tied to your savings account, all of the monies in your savings account are inaccessible. In addition, bank of America also charges you an overdraft fee (refunded after 7 – 10 business days) for this transaction of putting a hold on your account. So, in the end, my savings account money was floating in BOA’s databases, inaccesible to me for 1 buisness day.
Additionally, since I like BOA’s online banking so much, I transferred all of my online bill pays to their website. HUGE mistake. Once my checking account had to be closed, all of the bills were tied to that one account. I called BOA again, asked them why they couldn’t let me select one of my other accounts (the ones that were new and not closed) to pay my bills with, and they said that they couldn’t do that; I’d have to re-​set up all of my billpays again. After another few days (and when a few bills were due), they finally reversed it and allowed me to use one of my other accounts to pay my pending bills.
I signed and faxed back an affadavit and included one of my new account numbers to put the money back into. BOA re-​opened my closed account to put the money back in. I had to call to have the money transferred and that account closed again.
I thought that by visiting the banking center, that I could open up a new account and get back to my life with a small amount of hassle. I was told that new checks were ordered and would arrive in 7 – 10 business days. Well, today was the 10^th day (and after calling religiously every day since the 7^th business day, I was told that the checks were never ordered, or that they were lost in the mail (there’s no tracking number assigned to new checks sent out).
So in conclusion, here are the points I would like to make to suggest improvements to BOA’s way of handling fraud on accounts:
First and foremost, be consistent. Every person that I spoke to at BOA either on the customer service phone number or in person was not consistent with their answers or solutions to problems.
Don’t suggest a hold on the account as a solution to fraud. The hold made it much more complicated for me to get my money out of my old account and into my new ones.
Send via overnight mail FREE new checks with a tracking number, especially for victims of identity theft, such as me. I don’t know why a tracking number isn’t on all books of checks mailed, since they are such a financially sensitive document.
Allow clients to notify (or the bank) of online bill payees if fradulent activity has posted to the account and allow to negotiate.