Evil Bank Issues

[xoxoxoBruce]

If I lived in Kansas, I'd give Iggy all my deposits.

[Iggy]

hehehe

You know why bankers make good lovers?

We know the penalty for early withdrawal.

[xoxoxoBruce]

And they're in control of the interest.

[Juniper]

Originally Posted by Iggy

I work for a bank. And I deal with what happened to Juniper on a daily basis. For one, $5,000 is a lot of money to take a loss on. Where I work (at a smaller local bank) any check over $2,000 is considered for a hold. (Your bank just said it was "pending", we say it is put on hold... same outcome) There are other kinds of holds, but when a bank puts a hold on your check, it is basically to make sure it clears. We purposefully delay the availability of that check.
Where I work, we have to give you a form when we do this. It tells you when the check will be available, and the reason we are holding it.

See, that's my main problem. They didn't tell me when the funds would be available. You gotta hold my check for a week? Fine, just let me know it's going to be treated differently from the hundreds of deposits I've made in the past.

Also, we deposit your credits BEFORE we debit your account for anything. For example... you have $5 in your account Friday morning. Lots of things come through overdrawing you before noon that day. You can come in at 5:30pm (or until we close, we stay on the same business day) with a deposit covering all those items. At the end of the business day, we rearrange everything so the deposit posts before anything comes through to overdraw your account... and you don't get ANY fees. Whereas some banks would charge you the fees, because technically you were spending money you didn't have in the bank.

I guarantee my bank does not do this. I've watched the transactions get posted, with my online account access, in the course of a day. The checks get taken out first thing in the morning, and if the balance isn't sufficient, it goes straight to my overdraft account. The deposits are usually credited around noonish.

Juniper might not think that $5,000 isn't a lot of money, if you don't have that much in your account than the bank would take a loss if the check came back. And banks don't like losses.

I don't mean to sound flippant about that amount of money; it sure would be a lot for ME to lose. My point is that it's not what I'd consider a "red flag" for unusual activity. But I guess rules are rules. Just wish they were enforced consistently.

As for the scam? We get people in all the time with checks around that amount, that ARE A SCAM. They don't know that the check is counterfeit. You knew the check was good, but the teller probably didn't know you from Adam, how are they supposed to know that you are one of the people that gets checks like those sometimes??

A few months ago I made a similar deposit and the teller asked me what the check was for. I told her, and she said OK, she just wanted to make sure it was legit. There, wasn't that simple?

Oh well. Older and wiser, live and learn.

[Trilby]

Don't feel badly, Juni. I know: 5/3 is pure evil.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Juniper

But I guess rules are rules. Just wish they were enforced consistently.

AND, they tell you exactly what the hell they are.

When a bank admonished me for abusing my MAC card, I asked why they didn't tell me what the rules are.
The reply, "If we printed up all the rules it would be as big as a dictionary."
Well then, how the fuck you you expect me to know what the rules are?

[Iggy]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

AND, they tell you exactly what the hell they are.

When a bank admonished me for abusing my MAC card, I asked why they didn't tell me what the rules are.
The reply, "If we printed up all the rules it would be as big as a dictionary."
Well then, how the fuck you you expect me to know what the rules are?

Oh, I agree. I can't tell you how frustrating it is for me when I try to do my job, and everyone says no one else does it that way. My superiors expect me to follow the rules, or I get fired. But then others at different branches might let things slide through. But that is why there is such high turnover. All the tellers that you see that don't do their job? They get fired. Sooner or later, they slip up bad and get the can. That is why I have been in banking for 4 1/2 years, and haven't had that problem. And why some of my customers follow me from branch to branch as I transfer to get promotions. I explain what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and how it will affect them.

One of the problems with the rules is that they are vague. I'm sure there is one clause in the rules that say not to abuse your card, but don't state what they consider abuse. We give our customers a ton of disclosures when they open accounts that tell what we are going to do. Just one of the things it does is inform the customer that at any time, the bank reserves the right to hold your funds. We technically don't even have to notify you at the time, we can mail you the form. But I consider it common courtesy to inform my customers when I decide to hold their funds. And the rules also state that we won't do this with any check. It is hard for the customer to know what to do, since it says we can hold the check... but since it usually doesn't happen, everyone thinks it won't apply to them.

Bottom line, they should have informed you that they were going to do hold your funds, and what constituted abuse for his card. If they didn't do that, they should have refunded the fees and made things right... since it was the first time, and now you know and won't do it again. We do that all the time. But the situation of your check not being made available right away can and probably will happen at any bank.... especially since it happens sporadically. If you deposited $5,000 checks everyone month, from the same people, drawn off the same bank, around the same time, then chances are they wouldn't ever hold your check. They would have a steady history to know that the bank is going to honor your checks.

For example, 99% of the time we hold insurance checks because they are returned so much. And every time, I have to explain it to the customer. And every time, they give me the line that it is a real check, from a real bank, that they know has money. And every time, I have to explain that it doesn't matter whether or not that have the money in that situation, it matters if they will honor the check. It just got me riled up when you said:

I got a check for about $5,000. Doesn't matter where I got it, right? It's a real check, from a real company, drawn on a US bank.

Because it does matter where you got it. That is what I was trying to convey. Again, it sounds like you might need to switch banks. But you just have to know that the same situation could happen at the next bank. Just be careful, and do as much research as possible when you go to the bank.

[Sundae]

Can I just say I hate going to the bank?
It was frustrating enough in Leicester, where I went to a large bank that had four windows open (four tellers) and sometimes five. But now I have to go to my local branch in London, which has a maximum of three counters, and I've only ever seen two people working there at a time.

The other customers are either old or foreign, and there is always immense confusion surrounding their transactions. They never seem to have the right ID or card or book or something, or they have moved and haven't informed them or some such weary issue. I have to wait in the very hot bank while the bank staff get more and more aggravated with the customer in front and more and more likely to be snappy with me, or sit and shuffle papers for a couple of minutes while they cool down.

No it's not the cashier's fault. But it's why I hate going to the bank.

Oh - I found out I could withdraw money over the counter in the Post Office, so I no longer have to go into Greenwich to take out an amount under £10 (believe me, at the end of the month it's really important to be able to withdraw my last £8.67!) I just have to queue to pay in cheques. Why-oh-why-oh-why they don't have a machine like they do in damn near every other bank I've been in I don't know!