RJ has confirmed that Wells Fargo won’t clear a $1,200 check from a specific employee of the bank without first calling the person who wrote that check. What he can’t nail down is whether there’s a threshold on a check’s value to prompt the double-check or whether that amount varies from one account holder to another. The reason: Two different branches gave him inconsistent answers.

He writes:

Tried to cash a $1,200.00 from a renter yesterday at two different branches of WF in Redlands,CA. At the 1st, I was told they needed to call the check-writer (a WF employee, by the way) to make sure it was legitimately written. OK with me. They couldn’t get in contact, so they wouldn’t cash the check, even though I had plenty of I.D. I asked what dollar amount required a call to the account holder, since I had cashed lesser checks before at WF with no call required. They told me that there ‘was no dollar amount, it depends on notations to the account’, and the teller walked off before I could ask her to at least verify that the funds for the check were available. I had to go across town to deposit the check in my credit union, and there just happens to be another WF branch across the street, so I stopped there out of curiousity, just to see if I’d be treated any different.

There was a line of several customers, and one of the tellers was sent out to take the ‘straight deposit, no cash’ people to the head of the line. This really ticks me off — if you are putting money into WF coffers, you get priority treatment. Anybody withdrawing can just stand there and wait. Oh well, no problem, I’m not an account holder, and the geeks who still bank with them seem willing to be treated this way, I guess that’s their problem.

Same thing as at the other branch occurred with trying to cash the check — call to the check-writer, nobody home (since they are renting my house for the weekend), we can’t cash it. I asked if there was a dollar amount over which they wouldn’t cash a check and was told yes, there was, but they couldn’t give out that information.

I think this information would be relevant to the interests of anyone who banks with these clowns. Inconsistent policies from branch to branch, withholding of information to customers, refusing to cash checks written on their WF accounts. Why would anybody put their money in this bank?

If you’re a Wells Fargo customer who’s placed such a restriction on your account, let us know if you have this top-secret info.

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