Ed gets a daily account alert e-mail from Fifth Third Bank. Keeping up-to-date on your accounts is important, but that seems a little excessive. …Oh. What’s that you say, Ed? You don’t even have an account with Fifth Third Bank? Your e-mail address is associated with someone else’s account and you don’t know how to fix it?

The account in question is a Gmail account, and it’s most likely that another customer with a similar name to Ed’s gave the bank his address by mistake. Sure, he could set up account filters, but why is it Edit’s responsibility to keep someone else’s banking info out of his inbox?

For just over a year I’ve been receiving daily email alerts for my non
existent account at 5th Third Bank. I reached out to them when I first
received the emails via email, phone and went to a local branch. No
one could help so I tagged the email as spam, out of sight, out of
mind. Until this week my spam filter no longer blocked them and they
were arriving in my inbox. Today I called 5th Thrid Bank to try again
to get this stopped.

My first call I left a message and was told I’d get a call back. The
return call was from a branch and was advised I would need to call
Internet Banking.

On the phone with Internet Banking and was stunned when she asked for
my SSN. Advised her again I’m not a customer and just want the emails
to stop. She said she had to confirm I wasn’t a customer. Huh? Did
give her my zip code and after being on hold was advised I’m not a
customer. Brilliant. She then asked if the unknown bank customer and I
could have the same email address. Huh again.

She also could not transfer me to a supervisor and advised I would
need to stay on hold the entire time she tried to help me. It had
already been 15 minutes and told her I could not provide any new
information and to please stop the email on behalf of their customer.

If you read the email it tells to to reply if you are getting it in
error but later it reads do not respond. Responding to the email just
kicks it back.

Any ideas as to how to get this stopped?

The flaw with flagging these messages as “spam” is that Gmail’s spam reporting goes for everyone, not just you: other people could be getting their legit account alerts sent to spam. Setting up actual filters within Gmail is the only way to keep them out of your face. A regular snail mail letter or calling Internet Banking back to see whether someone who understands how the Internet works is available might work.

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