Another Decades-Long Profitable Norwest Customer Blown Off Repetitively (25% My Fault/75% Theirs)

I was with Norwest and then WF for 12 years (credit and checking accts) and for about the first decade everything seemed fine. I'm a relatively big-fish for checking account and so it saw lots of use and not many fees. The only problem I really had was discovering 7 years on down the road, that I wasn't getting points from my debit rewards card, but they fixed it quickly, did a retroactive credit and without much BS. Mostly I appreciated the ability to move all over the country and never have to change banks. 

However maybe 3-4 years ago something started to change with the way card transactions posted, and I started getting more overdraft charges. After the third or fourth time of seeing the same pattern of deposits and card transactions leading to severe overdrafts- I let go of the semi-automatic guilt of getting an overage notice, and started to realize that it wasn't MY behavior that had somehow gotten worse!!! And I started looking around for a new bank.

I first went with a large state-level commercial bank and while it felt better to be keeping my money in the state, I still felt like the debit card transactions were posting in pretty strange ways sometimes. Also this banks online system proved almost impossible for me to regularly use for a variety of reasons. So I kept looking for bank that seemed like it actually wanted my business.

When I finally discovered a credit union I liked, I didn't officially "switch" from WF, I just kept my balance really low and started mostly using my CU acct. This is what I did that was stupid. Because the auto bill from my WF CC to my checking account at WF was still active, it kept drawing down my small WF checking balance. So it got to the point where the checking was sub-$100 overdrawn, and because I wasn't paying any attention to my 12 year old unused checking account anymore, I let it go for 30 days. According to WF they "tried" to call me but didn't have my current phone number (did I mention the acct was 12 years old?) 

So of course these days they don't send you a letter until its been 30 days, and apparently they also close accounts without valid phone numbers, after 30 days (instead of the normal 60)- so this resulted in my not being aware of the overage until the account was already closed and reported to chexsystems!!! And of course even though it was paid off within days of the notice, its still on chexsystems preventing my from ever opening another checking account! 

Whats REALLY wierd, is a very similar thing then happened to my Wells Fargo CC about six month later. I kept the CC open because at that point it was the only rewards debit or credit card I had. Was making a lot of online purchases at this point and because it was during the 2011 summer CC fraud-wave, my larger online purchases kept getting frozen or rejected by WF fraud prevention. 

Fine, I understand this is part of having a safe credit card. What got annoying was to tell people at WF over and over that I was planning on making more big onine purchases and to please keep the line open in the future. I kept telling people this and it kept accomplishing nothing. So due to all this mucking about (and one of the big transactions being refunded) there were a whole series of large pending transactions some of which stayed pending for OVER TWO WEEKS! All this without every showing the transactions in the online program, so all I had to go on, while trying to maximize use of my points card- was running balance and available credit, for several weeks. I could tell my balance wasn't really matched up with reality but because I don't keep a seperate set of books I couldn't tell how bad it had gotten.

So I continued to make payments about once a week and make big online purchases. Because the amounts were always less than the available credit for that day, and because the transactions were successful, I assumed things were more or less ok. Imagine my surprise to login one day and see my account was overlimit by more than 2 grand- and transactions had cleared even DAYS AFTER the card was supposedly overlimit!! I immediately made a payment to bring it back under limit, and when I login again three days later to see if the payment cleared, I discovered that yes the payment cleared and that WF had also CLOSED THE CREDIT CARD! ALL REWARDS POINTS DELETED !

So of course that now makes two seperate WF accts that have been closed before they even gave me a chance to fix things. I was quite surprised to learn that a CC can go from underlimit to overlimit to closed in three days on a weekend. Probably even more surprised to learn that an assisant branch manager on the phone with corporate, can spend two hours trying to help me out and get nowhere. Apparently they don't want the business of the middle class anymore.

The silver lining it all this was to learn a few wierd facts about the payment processors (Mastercard in this case). Again these are things the WF branch told me after this happened

1- Even if you are told for 12 years you have a certain credit limit, in actuality its only theoretical and won't always stop transactions from going through above that limit.

2- Payment processors have the ability to "force" transactions to go through, even above your limit (Under certain circumstances of course) what made my particular purchases qualify for these special circumstances clauses, they never explained real well. Because they were online buys where I hadn't recieved or shipped any products yet, you'd think cancelling the transactions would be easier and not require "forcing" anything. And "wierdly enough" thats exactly what happened with a couple of smaller purchases in that time frame- but the big ones were ALL FORCED through which is what led to the overage disaster.

So again I do take reponsibility for not keeping my own ledger, but for all the rest of this- especially the continued and consistent inaccuracy of the online banking product (which was "of course" modified within a few days of this happening to me) I do blame Wells Fargo. I also blame them for not having customer reps with authority to overide the computer algorithms, which is obviously causing the loss of profitable customers.

Anyways the REAL silver lining to this is now ALL my loans and accts are with, or soon to be with, credit unions. You feel better, are treated better, and with CO-OP network CUs you can go to any branch across the whole country, deposit checks etc !