Leigh thought that she had laid her Wells Fargo checking account to rest. It was closed, gone, out of her life forever. When some forgotten auto-payments hit the account, though, instead of rejecting the payments, the bank zombified the account, brought it back to life, and charged Leigh and her husband a $35 overdraft fee for each item that hit their account. Wells Fargo put them on a payment plan to repay their balance, then turned around and sent the account to collections less than a month into the agreed-upon payment plan. Now they’ve been flagged as overdrafters in the Chexsystems database, and are still watching the account to make sure that no erroneous auto-payments hit it and trigger more overdrafts.

I don’t even know what to do right now. We closed our long-standing Wells Fargo account a few months ago. A couple of “auto payment” items went through and opened it back up. We didn’t realize it soon enough and over drafted. We got a letter in the mail and my husband called them over the phone and set up a payment plan with the rep on the phone. He said he could go make a deposit of $100 in cash in the nearest branch just to get the problem taken care of.

Just like a lot of people, we don’t have a ton of spare change in the budget to pay everything off right away, but we obviously wanted to take care of the debt that we owed (that happened because of their $35 overdraft fees that helps keep accounts negative, but that’s a letter for a different day!). That brought the amount owed down to $185. Well, my husband received a letter yesterday that Wells Fargo had sent our checking account to collections because we hadn’t paid the whole thing off and it was less than a month after our first payment. The amount was also significantly more even though my husband has been checking on it almost daily to make sure nothing else “goes through” that account (we had two companies try to take money from there months after we had switched payment information).

We called today and my husband is a calm man and when he told the rep on the phone that we couldn’t pay today [Saturday] (strict budget, we get paid on Thursday), the woman said she couldn’t do anything until we paid the whole debt amount off. When my husband asked why, she talked back to him in a rude tone. My husband asked to speak to a supervisor. She curtly told him “No.” and hung up on him.

I’m not one to go down without a fight and called right back. I gave them the whole story over again and the rep on the phone told me that the government regulations made it to where they had to close an overdrawn account. The bank had no choice. My husband was never informed of this while setting up the payment plan. I was sent to a supervisor who didn’t answer the phone and couldn’t leave a message because their inbox was too full.

While on the phone our mail came and we received a letter from our Credit Union saying that we were being put on Chex Systems because of this whole ordeal with Wells Fargo. We are desperately trying to fix this knowing that we did the right thing and were doing what Wells Fargo told us to do (what they put “in their notes”) so that we could take care the debt that we are willing to pay back. Can you help us in anyway? At the very least point us in the right direction. I’ve seen horror stories on the consumerist before and I never thought it would be us.

I know that I’m not just “accepting” what Wells Fargo has done to us. I wouldn’t have written to the website if I had even the tiniest thought that we did something wrong.

We don’t have current executive contact info for Wells Fargo on file, but this post from 2008 is be a good starting place.

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