USAA just pulled a huge mindf#@k on Travis and his wife, and now he wants to talk to someone high enough up the chain to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. His wife “went online yesterday to check on some transactions and discovered her IRA balance was $0. Six hours prior to that, her balance was $14,000.” When she tried to find out what had happened, the first CSR she spoke with told her she had no IRA account, and the second CSR told her to refresh her browser. Yeah, you know how these newfangled browswers are always wiping out retirement accounts.

I am in the military and both my wife and I bank with USAA. She and I have separate checking accounts and separate Roth IRA’s through USAA. Since we don’t live in San Antonio, we bank online with USAA. My wife went online yesterday to check on some transactions and discovered her IRA balance was $0. Six hours prior to that, her balance was $14,000. We live on the East coast and the banks phone lines close at 10:00 PM Eastern. My wife discovered her missing balance at about 10:30 PM.

USAA allows you to e-mail them and promises to provide a response within 24 hours. We sent an e-mail and waited until the next business day. No e-mail arrived and finally my wife could not take it any longer. She called at 5:00 PM Eastern and got a CSR on the line. The CSR treated my wife as if she was lying and kept telling her she must be thinking about her husband’s account because my wife has no account! My wife then demaned to speak to a supervisor and was “transferred” to the proverbial click…..dial tone. She called back and got in touch with another CSR who told her to “refresh” her screen because my wife must have been staring at the page too long. Lo and behold, her account appeared.

While her account was ultimately restored, I find it disconcerting that $14,000 can disappear that easily and then be treated so nonchalantly or even accusatory by the CSR. I also find it disheartening that USAA does not return e-mails for something of this magnitude.

I want to get a hold of someone HIGH in the food chain for an EECB and some phone numbers to go along with it. USAA guards these like the Colonels secret recipe and I wanted to ask the Consumerist for help. Can you help me??

We don’t have that info. Do any of you? The best we can come up with is the general mailing address and phone number, and names of executives. But even if you can’t get hold of private email addresses or phone numbers, you should still write a detailed account of what happened and mail copies of it to each one of USAA’s executives:

• Joe Robles, CEO
• Kristi Ann Matus, CFO
• F. David Bohne, President of USAA Federal Savings Bank
• Christopher Weber Claus, President of USAA Financial Services Group
• Wendi E. Strong, EVP, Corporate Communications
• Dawn M. Johnson, EVP Marketing

Update: A lot of readers are referring to a “glitch” and implying that the OP must have not refreshed her browser. I’ve marked in bold the important line from the second paragraph of the OP’s own story, where the CSR tells Travis’ wife that she has no IRA. If this was a glitch, it was certainly more than just on the OP’s computer.

(Photo: informant)