Fun with Banks (sarcasm intended)

Sometimes I wonder if I have a virtual sign on my forehead stating “please do screw me over.”

I’ve been trying to transfer money from Emigrant Direct to Wells Fargo for about 6 weeks now.  The Emigrant Direct account was linked to a closed Wells Fargo account, so I had to get it linked to the new Wells Fargo account.  I called them twice, they will not send money to the non-linked account.  They need this silly form and my printer won’t work.  So I ask that they mail me the form….3-5 business days.  Okay fine.

I get the form and fill it out.  Of course, they won’t accept faxes, they will accept emails BUT they didn’t tell me that.  I mail off this form on 8-5-2009.  I hear nothing but I was also told that the verification with Wells Fargo could take up to 3 weeks.  Finally on Monday 8-24-2009 I call them again, only to be told “Oh we don’t send those forms to Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo charges us $20.00 for each account verification, and oh by the way we told you this on 8-10-2009.”

Yeah, they had told me alright……a notice placed in my account customer service area ONLY. No contact to phone number(s) or email address(es) of which they had many to choose from.

“Thank you for mailing in your Wells Fargo voided check and bank verification form. Emigrant Direct policy has been to send out bank authorization forms when our customers wish to set up an additional funding account. One exception is Wells Fargo. Because they are now charging a $20.00 fee per verification form, we are no longer mailing out the forms to Wells Fargo. In lieu of the bank authorization form, we now request that customers send in a current bank statement from the checking account that they wish to add. Once received, we can complete your additional funding account verification. Please keep in mind, we need to see: the title holders, account number & type and the name of the bank. We do not need to view any financial information. You may blank out any financial information, if you wish. We apologize for any inconvenience. We will hold on to your voided check until you mail the statement to the address below: Emigrant Direct Attn: Acct Fulfillment Dept 13 Croton Ave Ossining NY 10562 or email to: edited@emigrant.com (as a pdf file from email address on record) Thank you”

Why do I have a problem with this?  My bank accounts (both old and new) have ALWAYS been Wells Fargo accounts.  You cannot tell me that this policy was put in place between the time I requested the form be mailed to me and the time they received the form.  So the (incompetent) customer service people at Emigrant Direct wasted my time (filling out the form) AND they wasted my money (for postage to mail it in).

I’m not proud of the fact that I screamed an obscenity at the customer service person right before I hung up on him.  On the other hand, you would think that the money in MY account was actually THEIR money the way they were hanging on to it!!

My free version of Adobe only allows reading PDF documents, not creating them. And since I get my Wells Fargo statements online, my assumption was that I was going to have to go to my branch and PAY for a copy of my most recent statement.  I got lucky in that my online statements are PDF documents, so all I needed to do was download the latest statement to my flash drive and then send an email with the PDF statement attached to Emigrant Direct.

My money was transferred into my Wells Fargo account this morning. My gratitude is heavily tempered by the fact I could have had that money in the account THREE FULL WEEKS AGO if not before if it hadn’t been for extreme incompetence on the part of Emigrant Direct.

Am I ever going to do business with Emigrant Direct again?………I DON’T THINK SO