My 3-year-old says “I don’t have to go potty,” takes a dramatic pause, then follows up with “But I do!” According to reader Alex, Bank of America echoes the delivery technique. BofA tells him it has received his e-bills. But it hasn’t!

Alex writes:

I use Bank of America’s online bill pay to pay all my bills. About two years ago I got a new credit card number for my Chase credit card, but everything continued to work fine with my online bill pay. Fast forward to last month, when Bank of America stopped receiving e-bills from Chase. You wouldn’t know this if you logged into my bill pay account, where it says “Receiving e-bills” under my Chase account (see attached picture). BoA only notified me of this problem through my “Bank of America mail”… yes, that tiny gray “mail” button in the corner, sandwiched between the location finder and help… who reads that??

They didn’t send me a real e-mail (I have Gmail so I can verify this), and I was duped by the innocuous “Receiving e-bills” message into thinking everything was okay. As a result I missed a payment. Chase was kind enough to refund the late fee after I paid up, but BoA’s e-bill representative insisted there’s nothing wrong with the web site, even though the “Receiving e-bills” status directly contradicts the notification that they sent to my Bank of America mailbox, which said that they couldn’t receive e-bills for the account. How hard would it be to program the status to change to “Error Receiving e-bills” in red, whenever this happens? I know that I was stupid and shouldn’t have relied on BoA (I actually caught the error in Mint), but I want to alert any other Consumerist readers who still use BoA that “Receiving e-bills” does NOT necessarily mean that BoA is receiving e-bills.

Has anyone suffered a similar failing with BofA or online bill pay at another bank?

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