Good Bye B of A, Don't Let The Door...

I'm furious. And this isn't the first time I've erupted over BofA and their abysmal level of what they have the temerity to call "customer care." So I'm fulminating. And I'm asking you, dear reader, to pull any money you have from BofA and put it somewhere else.

The short: yesterday at around noon I put some money in my daughter's account with a deposit slip. She lives in another city. The idea was that I would put in a personal check, she would have access to the money quickly. Wrong. Nothing is that easy with B of A.

After the deposit, the money just didn't show up on line in her account. She called. Where was it? It was pending. No it wasn't. Yes it was. Today, still no money. She called again: it was pending. No it wasn't. Yes it was. No it wasn't. I had to have my assistant go to the bank with the deposit receipt (luckily I didn't throw it away or lose it) and show it to them. They told her they would fix it.

Did they fix it? No, they did not.

Late this afternoon the bank called me. Did my daughter have the money? No she didn't. Sir, she will have the money tomorrow. And they have some crazy, convoluted story about couriers not arriving and checks being someplace else and not being recorded and not entered in the system and what can be done and what cannot be done and yadda yadda yadda.

I'm not accepting this double talk bs kind of "customer service." I'm not thankful for their call or their bogus explanation as to why the money is not where it's supposed to be. After all, it's my money, right? I want it to be in my daughter's account. Simple, right? Evidently not. Evidently it doesn't have to work that way, and you, dear customer, don't get a real explanation or an apology. More important, you don't get the money. No, you sucker, you moron. You don't get squat. At the very most you get, it'll be in there tomorrow. Oh. Well where is it now? Well, sir, I can get half of it in here today, but you have to come in and sign some papers? No. I've already spent too damn much time on your screw up. I want the money in the account and I want it now. No, sir, we can't do that.

What? I have a receipt for my deposit. I deposited a check. We agree about the amount. It says it on my receipt. I want the moolah, the amount I deposited put in her account. And I want it now. And no, I don't want to hear the "explanations" of how a very large corporation (masquerading as a small dog) ate your grotesquely inadequate bookkeeping (camouflaged as your utterly insufficient homework).

Sir, the best we can do, is make sure it is in her account in the morning. The dough better be there in the morning. If it's not, I will have to spend even more time with "customer service" making sure that my money is where it's supposed to be. I do not look forward to this.

So this evening, I emailed all my three grown up kids, all of whom have accounts in BofA, and I said (short version): Get your money out of that f*cking bank. Open a new checking account somewhere. Yeah, I know it was efficient to have branches all over the known world, but we have to work around this. I cannot tolerate this level of bogus "customer service." And I want your sister to have the money I deposited in her account.

It's simple. B of A doesn't deserve to hold any of my family's money. I pulled my money out three years ago. My kids need to do the same. And BofA? They deserve to watch us bank with somebody else.

Join us.

Victory: Bank Of America Releases The Funds

Join me in a brief celebration. And please accept my gratitude for helping me find my way through this problem.

You might recall my recommended diary on Monday in which I complained about how Bank of America had frozen a $4,000 deposit until December 7 at 5 pm and that it was money my son needed for a trip. I asked in the comments for suggestions from Kossacks about how to get the money released.

Join me in the champagne room.

Well, sure enough, ElRay suggested that I send a group email to B of A executives explaining my problem and asking them please to fix it. Right now. I did that. I sent the email to more than a dozen executives. It was courteous and explained my problem and stated what I wanted done.

Long story short, I got a call from a B of A executive on Tuesday morning. I was surprised. He said he'd look into it and see whether they could release the funds, which they would do when the check reached the bank where it was written. He wasn't sure how long that might take.

And today, much to my amazement, the same B of A executive called my son to say that the hold was lifted, all of the money was available to my son right then. No hold. No waiting. Released.

In other words, whether B of A's holding the funds was or was not legal, they caved in and released the funds. My son's leaving on a trip with his money. We don't have to wait until December 7 at 5 pm to get it. Case closed. Money in hand. Hooray.

I applaud all of you for your help and suggestions.

Bank of America: Give Me My Money. Now.

Maybe the Internet is the only way to get the ear of a banking corporation so deaf and so greedy that it cannot hear my screaming and thinks it can do whatever it wants with my money. Maybe even this diary won't work to open their ears and pierce their conscience and cause them to release the money. Maybe Bank of America pwns all of us. I hope it doesn't, but I suspect it does.

This diary is about my interaction today with B of A. And it's about why my son cannot get my hands on $4,019 of his own money until after 5 pm on December 7. This diary is being written because, guess what, he needs the $$ before then. It's his, isn't it? Well, maybe not. Not until after 5 pm on 12/7.

Join me in the drive through.

The story is extremely simple.

I sold some stock on which I am the trustee for my son so he could make a trip to Asia. As a result of the sale (which by the way took more than 5 business days to end up in a bank check) I received a check in the mail for $4,119. The check written to me and him was a bank check written on a New York bank and the check represents the sale of stock we owned. Put another way, the check is good unless I'm a forger (I'm not) or the issuing bank fails before the week is over. Nobody expects the latter.

I took the check to my local BofA, in Chatham, New York, to deposit it in a checking account belonging to my son. I got there before 3 pm. I made the deposit. Funny thing. I got a note with the receipt that said in substance that I was a complete sucker: only $100 of the check was available now, the rest, $4,019 would be available after 5 pm on December 7, 2009. December 7? That's a full week away and then some.

Folks, they are holding the money for a week for no legitimate reason at all. The check is good. They could confirm it with a simple phone call. I did not forge the check. But my son cannot have his money for a full week.

This might seem to be a small, even a trivial insult. If it were only I and my son who had the problem. But when you spread this practice over thousands and thousands of deposits, deposits that are good, deposits that get money to the bank long before they release the funds to the depositor, you're talking a profitable practice for the bank and a loss for the consumer. How big a profit? How big a loss? I have no real idea. All I know is that the check is good and we're not allowed to have money that belongs to us.

I told my son about this mess. He called BofA. Many levels of customer service, supervisors, bosses, bosses of bosses. No luck. They are not going to release his money. It's their Policy. Why? Evidently because we cannot make them release it. They don't have to, they say, and guess what, they won't release it. Period.

After his illuminating call with "Customer Service," and panicking that he could not make his trip without the dough, he went to a branch in NYC near where he lives. Said the "customer service" person to whom he spoke, pardon the paraphrase, "That's a backroom problem. I can only deal with front room issues." This could be the segue to a joke, but alas, it isn't. No help from "customer service."

When they've got you, they think they've got you. You're powerless to do anything to get them to take their paws off your money and turn it over to you. It's your money, right? Well...

I realize that this problem will be concluded on 12/7 at 5 pm with the release of the funds. I can get him some money so he can make his trip and then get the rest of the cash to him. That's not the real problem.

The real problem is that we, he and I, and you as well as consumers are continuously being victimized by BofA and many of its global competitors.

When they scream that they need to be bailed out, that they need tax money to keep them afloat, that they're too big to fail, that they're illiquid, that they have issues, we taxpayers grovel and write the check. A mighty big check. We save their butt every time. We keep them from failing.

And in their gratitude for our keeping them afloat, what do they do? They continue policies designed solely to gouge us and to garner profits to which they are simply not entitled, profits they will keep and not share with us, profits they make in many ways and in particular by holding our funds and preventing us from having them.

We have to be gigantic suckers to put up with loaning giving these folks our tax money and not exacting any returns from them. And we have to be idiots to let them continue to gouge us.

I could tell you to complain about this abuse and the rest of it by calling them, but if you don't want to be on hold for half an hour, I don't recommend it.

If I could, I'd write a song about how much they suck, but I'm not that talented.

The best I can do, and I concede it is very, very little, is let the smoke curl out of my ears and write this diary.