Did you sneer at the mysterious AOL breach that has compromised some customers’ information because you don’t use AOL e-mail anymore? Yeah, about that. Some former AOL users have reported that messages went out under their former IDs. Are spammers forging messages from defunct addresses, or have these AOL accounts gone zombie? [More]
zombie accounts
Yahoo Won’t Let Me Reclaim My Old E-Mail, Hasn’t Purged It Either
By 12.4.13
Ben was caught in the Great Yahoo Purge of 2013. The company figures that you’re not going to come back for the webmail address that you registered in 1999, and decided to “reclaim” usernames that hadn’t been used in a very long time for reuse. The problem was that Ben’s ID was still in the system, but not available for him to sign in to. [More]
Safe Deposit Key Refund Zombifies Bank Of America Account
By 10.31.13
It’s the end of the day, so let’s all gather around the soft glow of our monitors and tell spooky stories. I’ll start. Not that long ago, an ordinary consumer had a terrifying experience. He laid his Bank of America account to rest last August, never imagining that it would rise from the dead to eat his brains wallet. [More]
How A 1¢ Interest Payment Zombified My Bank Of America Account
By 9.12.13
A few days ago, we shared the hilarious and pitiful one-cent check that a reader received after closing out his Bank of America money-market account and taking the funds elsewhere. This was a silly and annoying waste of paper and postage, but better than the alternative…having the account go zombie and run up a negative balance when it should have been long since dead. [More]
Why Does Chase Keep E-Mailing Me About My Closed Non-Zombie Account?
By 2.19.13
Elizabeth wishes that Chase would stop sending her emails. They’re not spam, exactly: she used to be a customer. But she’s getting e-mails as if she still had accounts there, and she closed hers more than a year ago. She was afraid that it has gone zombie: that is, that it’s been mysteriously re-opened without her permission to make unwanted payments and devour her credit score. [More]
Suntrust Checking Account Wasn’t Really Closed, Goes Zombie
By 1.25.13
Stephen had an account at Suntrust, and decided to leave that bank behind and start a shiny new credit union account with his wife. He left the Suntrust account open instead of withdrawing all of his money and transferring it to the new account, spending it until it was empty, then going in to close it. This plan would have worked beautifully if Suntrust had actually closed the account when he asked them to. [More]
Chase Customers: Did The Bank Ever Re-Open Your Closed Account?
By 9.13.12
Over the lifetime of Consumerist, we’ve written a number of stories about so-called zombie bank accounts, where a consumer finds out their closed account has been re-opened without their knowledge or approval, usually after some third party attempts to make a direct deposit or debit on the dead account. If you were a Chase bank customer and your account was resurrected from the grave, we’d like to hear from you. [More]
Bank Of America Says It Has Stopped Creating Zombies From Dead Accounts
By 8.22.12
For years, we’ve been telling tales of terror abut bank customers whose supposedly dead bank accounts suddenly sprang back to life after some unwitting third party attempted to make a direct deposit or debit on the account. But realizing that this whole zombie thing is so overdone these days, Bank of America says it has put an end to the practice. [More]
Zombie Bank Of America Account Makes Me A ‘Delinquent’
By 6.18.12
The last time that Jen had visited a Bank of America branch, her deposit of more than $3,000 had been credited to the wrong customer, and she was there to make sure that she got her money back. A branch manager denied her assertions, denied that there was a mistake, and told her that she must have deposited the money in another bank. There was no other reasonable explanation…or so it seemed until she pulled out the receipt from her deposit. Oh. She closed her account that day, and assumed that her relationship with Bank of America was now over. She was incorrect. [More]
