Greedy Corporate Bank With Poor Customer Service, Focused On Profit Margins Not Their Customers

I understand how difficult customer service and banking can be. In my industry, I have lots of experience working with banks and various other service industries. However, I have never, in my life, hung up on any customer service folk. At Bank of America (BofA), I've hung up on 3. Let me summarize my worst 3 experiences with this bank.

1) In 2010, I went to dinner at a Sushi Restaurant. When putting in my tip, the restaurant accidentally inputted too many numbers into the credit card till, and instead of a $45 transaction, my bill was a $45,908.54 transaction. BofA CLEARED this transaction and then spent over a week to reverse the money. At age 23, I did not have anywhere near this amount of money in my account and so I incurred, without doubt, a number of overdraft fees (this was before I finally realized a $45K+ transaction had cleared). Since it took them over a week to reverse the transaction, I was without money for a week. Furthermore, when I had called Customer Service to disput this transaction, the man on the phone asked me if I was trying to buy the restaurant. This was a serious question. Next, instead of reversing all of my overdraft fees, he only reversed half of them. I am not quite sure what his logic was here.

2) Recently, I had to write a few post-dated checks for a house rental. The rental company had deposited them all at once -- something they've done for the past few years. Every other bank would hold onto the checks and deposit the check according to the date listed. BofA cashed all checks immediately, and then started ringing in the overdraft fees. I called them again to disput this. The lady on the phone told me that BofA has no policy to cash checks according to the date listed on the check. In fact, if the check was post dated 6 months (or similarly, 3 years old or dateless), BofA would STILL clear the check. This hardly seems like a good security measure for your bank to have. Let alone a bank as big as BofA. In this instance, while the post-dated check clearing annoyed me, what upset me the most was how the customer service rep handled the issue. In summary, she had basically told me that: this wasn't her problem, it wasn't the bank's problem, and it was my problem to figure out. In fact, I believe she asked me the very question "well, what do you want me to do? There's no way I'm reversing the overdraft fees and there's nothing else to do."

3) BofA likes flagging the most random transactions on your account as "fraud" and putting a freeze on your account without warning. One or two random freezes without warning, I can understand. The bank is just trying to protect your account and is freezing your card for security measures. However, it gets extremely frustrating and annoying when this happens 4, 5, 6 times... and all, again, without warning. No email or phone call until the next day. By then, you are already aware your account has been freezed, because you were at dinner or out grocery shopping and your card was (embarassingly) declined, and you have no idea why.

For these reasons, as soon as I can, I will be switching banks to one that cares about their customers before their shareholders. A company that puts their shareholders and board members before the core of their business (their customers) will, inevitably, fail, and I hope the rest of America will see this soon.

Thank you for your response Wil.

Yes, Point 1. It was with my debit, not credit, card. The incorrect charge was the tip inputted by the merchant afterwards, not what I had signed off on. I still had my copy of the receipt and also asked the restaurant to pull the receipt with my signature they had on hand. I had signed correctly and the mistake was made by the merchant when they inputted the fees. I believe most people pay via credit and/or debit cards when dining at restaurants, so letting them take my card out of site has become standard practice by most.

For point 2, as mentioned, I have no problem with them depositing a post dated check. While I disagree, it is just more annoying than anything else. My problem was how the lady had handled the issue over the phone, blatantly saying "What do you want me to do? This is not my problem," when her job is to handle customer service issues in a helpful way.

And point 3. The freezes have nothing to do with the transaction in point 1. I actually asked them this over the phone. It is a standard policy BofA has to prevent "fraud." The unfortunate part of it is that they do not alert you immediately so that you can authorize "flagged" transactions before your acocunt is frozen.