Bank of America twiddled their thumbs as an identity thief withdrew over $40,000 from Chris Hooley’s account over five transactions in a single day. Chris canceled his Bank of America debit card immediately after he lost his wallet, which should have put a big red flag in Bank of America’s system to stop them from handing over tens of thousands of dollars to a stranger. Apparently it didn’t!
Chris only noticed the massive withdrawals after the police arrested the thief.
They said they caught this guy at BestBuy trying to use somebody else’s credit card to buy a whole bunch of computers. Apparently BestBuy’s register system pops up an alert code if there is somebody trying to use a card that has been reported lost or stolen, and they call the cops. Impressive. The police caught the guy red handed. With drugs. And paraphernalia. And a bunch of people’s personal information.
At the time, I thought they got the sucker before he could do any real damage. But just to be safe, I checked with Bank of America. I was shocked to see my account was overdrawn by almost $300. Last I checked, I had almost 40k in there.
A quick review turned up 5 suspicious transactions. Two were deposits, and three were withdrawals. All five transactions occurred *inside* five different Bank of America banking centers. What amazed me most is the final two transactions. A withdrawal of 26k. And later that day, another withdrawal of 12.5k. Way to spot suspicious activity Bank of America. They handed the guy almost 40k in cash in one day.
Turns out the first two transactions where not just deposits. They were checks written to me, Christopher Hooley. The first one was $6200. The guy kept $5k and left $1200 in my account. The next one was a day later at a different center for $7500. Again, the guy kept $5k. I saw the debit slip online, and this guy’s signature wasn’t even a remote attempt to copy mine. To make matters worse, it turns out he was forging checks from another valley business, who subsequently called the police on ME!
Great work protecting your customers, Bank of America!
Way to Spot Suspicious Activity Bank of America [Chris Hooley's - ThinkBait-]
(Photo: Getty)
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BoA disappeared a $4000 counter deposit I made a couple of weeks ago. Gone! No trace. Fortunately I had put the checks in the hands of a teller instead of an ATM, and I had the deposit receipt.
I went back the next day to kindly request my effing money, and they blamed it on being short-staffed and put a $3999 credit into my account.
Bank of America, Bank of Opportunistic Bastards.
For muslims collecting interest is considered a sin. Most don’t care or excuse it as being a way to help offset inflation. So a person was a strict follower of islam they would keep the majority of their cash in checking or other non interesting bearing account
Forgottenpassword asks:
“ANd who keeps $40,000 in a check account1!!!? A rich person?I figure $5,000 tops in the checking account is ok. I personally keep less than $2,000 in mine. The rest is in savings.”
I keep $40,000 in my checking account because I need to. My checks to American Express each month often are over $15,000. There are also other large checks I write.
We must remember that just because we have a certain lifestlye and financial situation, that does not mean everyone else who reads this blog is like us. I think alot of us live our lives surrounded by people like us and we forget that other people live vastly different lives…but sometimes we go to the same blogs.
I usually find this blog interesting. But sometimes I’m surprised by the people here who seem to be living on the edge financially and apparently think it’s ok.
@Skeptic: I love it! It hits it spot on. Before “Identity Theft” became the big buzzword, this type of thing absolutely would have been called bank fraud, forgery, etc.
I tell you, even thought it’s a British Skit, if the OP ever takes this to court to get their money back, I think it would be worth playing this to the jury to get them to understand how the bank was at fault. Mine checks my drivers license everytime I’m at the teller. It’s a credit union, which tends to be popular type of institution around here.
@xay: the difference in rates on a checking vs savings is usually between 1 and 3 percent on US accounts. There are a few exceptions like eTrade where you can get 3.5 on checking if you have like 10k in there.
@forgottenpassword: I’m sorry, but that’s some of the stupidest financial “advice” I’ve ever heard. Use a credit card (with interest rates and fees that click in even if you pay it all back within the month) rather than a debit card (which is your cash on hand)? That’s a really terrible idea. Better by far for banks to protect the debit cards that work better for everyone involved.
And although I am not a wealthy person, I’ve sometimes kept checking balances as high as $20K. It depends on what check(s) you’re about to write.
@picardia:
One problem:
The reason thie very article exists is because , on a debit card, its YOUR money. So if its lost ,stolen or compromised, why does the bank care about replacing YOUR hard earned money?
Its not percieved to be their problem because they don’t suffer from losing YOUR money.
A credit card is the banks own money on loan.So youd better believe if theres fraud, theyll kill it in a hurry.
Not only are you only liable for $50 if disaster happens,but the bank has a reason to stop any fraud.
Consumerist Bank Story Posting Algorithm
1. Banks are doing something that doesn’t help the customer.
2. Does BoA do it?
- Yes: Did we get a sub about BoA doing it?
– Yes: Post it!
– No: Find a story on BoA doing it, and post it.
- No: Wait until BoA does it, then repeat #2.
@picardia: If you pay it off properly, there are many cards where you’ll only pay the annual fee (if there is one) for your card, and meanwhile be earning rewards for high usage of said card. Sounds like win/win to me
That’s it, I’m taking all my money out of banks and burying it in the yard. I wish I were serious, but I can’t get direct deposit in my yard and my work really prefers it. My problem with BoA was not in the account I had, though I loved how much they fought me when a service my wife had used through Direct Withdrawal wouldn’t stop charging us, claiming that since she gave them access once, they could keep it.
My problem was closing my account. I went in person, with my wife, closed out the account in the form cash and certified checks (had a couple of bills that I wasn’t going to have checks for yet). I insisted on some sort of confirmation that the account was closed, but all they gave me was a copy of the request. I hadn’t used any checks or my bank card in over a week and had asked to make sure that the amounts were correct so that it would be closed, and they told me there was nothing showing on their system. Instead of just closing the account, they pushed through 3 transactions the next day that were automatic withdrawals from online subscriptions that my wife couldn’t get canceled. The companies involved were simply agreeing to cancel the subscriptions and then ignoring it. While I know there were other options, I had had enough with BoA anyway so I just figured I’d close the account and change banks. They let the 3 transactions through on my “closed” account, and then charged me overdraft fees and started charging service charges to the account. I called and they canceled the fees, but wanted the 55 dollars from the original transactions. I told them I wasn’t going to pay them and if they left the account open there would be more charges I wasn’t going to pay for, and if they closed it as a bad account and posted it to my credit score, it would end up in court. They told me they were holding the account open and I had to pay, but 2 days later I got a notice from them in the mail that the 55 dollars was forgiven and the account was closed. This was 2 years ago, and I still haven’t seen anything on my credit report, so hopefully that’s the end of it.
I don’t even have an annual fee, and I get rewards; nor do I incur finance or late fees. And I’m hardly a big-deal customer. The reward percentages overall (considering where I spend money) exceed the interest rate on any checking accounts I could get, too. I think banks should also protect debit cards, but picardia, there are credit card deals much, much better than the one you describe.
But I also think it’s an individual decision, and that BOA should have acted more responsibly. I wonder if opening a new account and moving the money into it would have been enough, or if he would have had to actually change banks.
I got hit from HSBC with a similar scam in the amout of 17,500 or so. They let someone withdraw this money in 3 transactions in canada. I have a card from the US of A.
But they have no problem freezing my card when I tried to buy 7g’s worth of AV equipment.
Way to go banks! Keep us trusting you!
Did I read right that the thief deposited a check and got cash back? That is the very oldest bank scam in the book, and the exact reason that bank tellers make you show ID to deposit a check if you don’t deposit the entire check. How did BofA miss this?
A friend of mine is currently going through hell with BofA as well.
Her card was stolen two weeks ago. She immediately canceled her card and got a new one. There was some problem with the activation on the new card, and she spent quite a while battling with CSRs to get it sorted out. She finally got it all taken care of and everything seemed fine for a few days.
Late last week she was shopping and her _new_ card was denied numerous times. She called BofA and was told that she was overdrawn $888,000.
$888,000. Eight hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars.
The phone representatives told her that she needed to visit a BofA branch to talk with somebody in person.
She spoke with a number of people at the branch before anybody would tell her why her card was so ridiculously overdrawn. Apparently the bank decided that they wanted to close her account (no reason given), so they withdrew $888,000 in order to “flag the account.” She was not overdrawn before the incident, and demanded that they give her the money that she had in the account. They refused, saying that they would mail her a check within 10 days.
On top of all that, they are threatening to report her massive bank-fabricated debt to ChexSystems.
She currently has no credit, is about to get married, and just moved from Washington to California. Her BofA account was her only bank account, and she has been without any ability to pay for anything for the past four days (and counting).
The double whammy of going to ChexSystems for false debt and being without access to her money for an undetermined amount of time looks like it could pretty well ruin her financial life for at least the near future. Not to mention the pain and hassle of trying to get everything corrected.
What most people don’t realize is that most banks aren’t actually online all the time. Banks are notoriously cheap about network connections. A lot of times the account info is replicated once or twice a day to in-house System 36 or System 38 type systems, so there’s a several hour window when the batch info isn’t current.
A thief could exploit this easily.
The banking system was fine when it was just ATM cards. Once they tied it into POS systems the wheels came off and that’s the end of it.
For those ignorant enough to blame Chris for having $40,000 in a checking account, first of all nobody indicated it was a checking account. It could have been a money market account. Today some money market accounts pay some of the best interest rates AND you can move the money immediately if you think your bank is going under AND they are a very good place to hold money, rather than locking it in while you wait for CD interest rates to climb back up. The problem is whether BofA will give Chris back his money. They will probably try to say that he gave out his pin number or something…
@eddmel: “We must remember that just because we have a certain lifestlye and financial situation, that does not mean everyone else who reads this blog is like us. I think alot of us live our lives surrounded by people like us and we forget that other people live vastly different lives…but sometimes we go to the same blogs.
I usually find this blog interesting. But sometimes I’m surprised by the people here who seem to be living on the edge financially and apparently think it’s ok.”
Take your own advice and remember everyone is different. I don’t know how many people out there just keep $40,000 in their chequing (ya, I’m Canadian), but even amongst the rich, I bet it’s a small percentage. You come off sounding like an elistist d-bag who is looking down on people who have less.
That pisses me off so much as Bofa recently put a hold on one of my final paycheck issued by the *county*, for pete’s sake. I had recently moved from another state and as a “new customer” could only access $200 of those funds for ten days…so at least 8 of which Bofa had that money to play with and I didn’t.
The fact that their ATMs also can’t read postal money orders ticks me off, too. I guess it’s the usual “I hate them so much but their ubiquity forces me to do business with them” gripe.
@BIG WHEEL: @eddmel: I know many people who keep that much in their checking accounts, for various reasons. As someone else mentioned, it may have been a MMA. Either way, it’s not that out of the ordinary. I keep that much around in “liquid” funds also. There really is a great financial range of commentors at the Consumerist.
This pales in comparison, but just the other day, I went in to the bank to get a balance on my account. Turns out, the teller gave me the balance to another person’s account. The account numbers weren’t even CLOSE. The balance was within $150 of what I guessed I had, but I wound up over-drawing and THAT’S when I took a closer look at the account number on the stub.
I gave the teller a copy of my latest statement so she could type the account number directly, and gave her my ID. I have a fairly unusual name, too.
That teller must have been smoking CRACK.
@oldheathen: I had the same problem with a check from the STATE OF WASHINGTON. No kidding. It was for just over $4,000. It wasn’t even drawn from a rival bank, it was drawn from the WASHINGTON STATE TREASURY. My account wasn’t new, it wasn’t overdrawn. I had never bounced a check before. I was about as low-risk as they come.
They just said that since it was a check, in a large denomination, that they were placing a hold on it. A ten *business* day hold, which really means a two week hold– longer if there’s a holiday thrown in!
When I asked them why they were holding my money back, they said that they needed to guarantee that the check would clear. Ummmm… The check issued from the State of Washington? Ya, I think they’re good for it.
I asked a manager if he would at least release a PORTION of it (it was my financial aid check and if I didn’t pay my tuition, I was going to get my classes dropped). His answer? No way, Jose. $100 of it was all I got my hands on until the full ten days passed.
When I pressed the issue about the ten-day rule (does it REALLY take that long for a check to clear?! can’t they just release the hold once the check goes through?!), I was informed by the manager that my check might *technically* clear after just one business day, but that they were going to restrict my access to it just to “make sure.” Make sure that what?! The state doesn’t call to take the money back?
I talked to another rep who tried to convince me that it really DID take ten days for a check to clear– I went so far as to ask her if they sent the check to the state treasury and then the state treasurer himself drove my $4,000 and change back up to the BofA in an armored truck and handed my money over in cold hard cash… I was obviously being facetious, but the lying liar of a rep said that YES, it actually did work something like that.
WTF?! Do they think I’m freakin’ dumb?! BofA really is the freakin’ worst of the worst of the worst. I’ve got a million stories just like this one, thanks to BofA’s crap policies and business practices.
I’ve been with my credit union for seven years now and I’ve never, ever had a problem. Not even a single little tiny complaint. They’re *amazing.* Everyone should ditch their bank go to a credit union– I never knew that banking could be this good…
@mythago: Did I read right that the thief deposited a check and got cash back? That is the very oldest bank scam in the book, and the exact reason that bank tellers make you show ID to deposit a check if you don’t deposit the entire check. How did BofA miss this?
As explained in the link, the wallet came with an ID. The thief looked similar to the victim. Checking ID in this case? Worthless as a form of security, and it’s not like cash back on a deposit is something out of the ordinary.
It’s kind of like what I previously said about credit cards: If a thief steals your credit card, he’ll probably get your ID too. Add a little slight of hand, and checking ID is no deterrent to fraud. (Better to require PINs like in the UK. Not perfect, but better.)
i LOVE credit unions. i have belonged to a total of three in my life, still have accounts at two [one was in my previous state of residence only]
last week my car’s engine blew up. i kept trying to keep it running because it was paid for but when the repair estimate is twice the car’s RUNNING value…. it’s time to let it go.
i had the mechanic drop me at the nearest branch of my credit union to apply for a vehicle loan before going car shopping
the loan officer not only helped me figure out what price range to ask for by pulling up the kelly blue book values for me, she advised me that my credit report showed several recent credit checks [which i knew about, i had a credit card limit raised recently] and advised me [since i have never financed a car purchase before and know nothing about the workings] that i should NOT allow the car dealership to run a credit check since it wasn’t needed [what with the preapproval and all] and it might affect my credit history negatively
i can’t imagine a commercial bank taking that kind of trouble for a customer
as a point of interest, when the car salesman tried to run a credit check and i refused, he told me it was ‘to make sure i wasn’t a terrorist because they get fined if they sell a car to a terrorist’
um… no. credit checks do NOT get you super secret access to the terrorist watch list.
i refused, he told me to take it up with the finance guy. the finance guy didn’t even ask. he said ‘oh, you’re preapproved with the credit union? sign the intent to purchase, take the keys. when they finalize the loan have them call us to say the check is on the way. drive safe!’
i especially love that my credit union can communicate with a customer over the phone or via secure internal email 24 hours a day and when my debit card got posted twice for a transaction a couple of weeks ago, they fixed it with two emails back and forth and it only took about 3 days to get the money back.
grrr… darn it, sorry, wrong tab! that last was supposed to go under the credit union page
So, what happens with the guys money? Is it covered by the banks insurance or what? Will he have to go down the court route to get his money? Also, not to be prejudice, but most people who carry drugs and paraphernalia usually don’t look like the kinda people who should be withdrawing 26k in a bank. That didn’t raise any questions? I may not be the from the US, but BoA seem to be very, very, very bad at running a bank. Which is a bad thing is running a bank is actually what you do…
One more BofA nightmare security story here. Last year my wallet was stolen out of my purse at a bar. A week later, I went to take money out at the ATM on a Friday night and was overdrawn $4k. Not right, so I went to my branch first thing the next day. Someone had walked into a BofA with my stolen ID and kited several checks – making fake deposits to inflate the balance, then withdrawing thousands of dollars (by the time the bank realizes the checks are hot, the money is gone). Because my account had been in “good standing”, the teller apparently didn’t ask too many questions. Fine, could happen to a lot of people, my ID was old, etc. I opened a new account, was refunded my money and had a fraud alert placed on the account which would require any depositor/withdrawer to show a certain piece of identification.
Exactly one week later, the thief performed the SAME maneuver again! Apparently the fraud alert – which is supposed to pop up on the teller’s computer and alert them to get a supervisor – wasn’t placed at all. Cut to me spending another 2 hours on the phone with fraud prevention. It was especially creepy because my branch manager was able to show me on the computer the exact deposit slip that the thief had filled out – with my old address (from my old ID), that I haven’t used in 10 years, that has NEVER matched ANY address I’ve ever given to BofA. Again, my money was refunded, but it was still a complete hassle. I do think that many cases like these must have a teller helping the thieves – doesn’t someone making several large deposits and then one huge withdrawal in the same day set off ANY alarms??
Say what you will about Washington Mutual, but at least they have some security against this type of stuff. You can’t withdraw or deposit money into your account without first swiping your debit card and entering in your PIN.
@Melt: Citibank does this too. I hate WF but it appears Citibank is going down the same fee-happy tubes WF inhabits, so i’ll be ditching them soon after 6 years.