Worst Banking Experience of my Life.
I was with Wells Fargo for nearly 20 years, in Boulder, CO for most of that time, and didn't have any major problems for a long time. However, in the last while before I left the bank, I had a whole series of problems with Wells Fargo and every attempt they made to correct their mistakes led to even larger problems, ending in me receiving a phone call from a collections agency about an account that Wells Fargo was supposed to have closed. The account had a zero balance when I closed it. The bank employees were exceptionally unhelpful to me when I wanted to resolve this.
The problems started small. I had trouble closing a travel account. Time consuming but not a big deal.
Next, I opened a business checking account with Wells Fargo and the banker I opened the account with put the wrong address on the account. Several phone calls and a trip to the branch later, it seemed like nobody at Wells Fargo understood the very simple request of taking this address off of my account because they kept simply moving it to different accounts. This was a major problem later on.
I ordered two checkbooks, one for my business account and one for my personal account and they were both lost in the mail. The business account checkbook was sent to the wrong address (the same wrong address I had removed from the account several times). Wells Fargo didn't have tracking information for either checkbook and the checkbooks had all my bank account information on them so I had to close the accounts since whoever received the checks would have access to my bank accounts. I was without checks or a debit card until they sent me new ones (the new checks never arrived), and I had to redo all my online banking, automatic payments that I have set up, etc. Irritating, but still not the end of the world.
The process of closing accounts and opening new accounts got messy and it took several trips into a branch to sort it out. However, I was assured that the old accounts were closed (not just frozen) and that no charges could be drawn from the closed accounts. I was also assured that my checks for the new accounts would arrive very soon.
A couple of weeks later, no checks had arrived and I got a phone call from the Wells Fargo collections agency saying that my business checking account was overdrawn. I had just been online looking at the account that morning and it had plenty of cash in it. I finally figured out that she was talking about my old account - the one that was supposed to be closed. She also had the wrong address for that account - the same wrong address I'd removed from the account quite a few times already. Not only did Wells Fargo leave this account open (and associated with the wrong address) after they had assured me the account was closed, but they did not contact me to say the account was overdrawn. They went directly to a collections agency and now my credit could be affected. At this point, I called the banker, Kelly Hogan, who had set up the business account for me and I left him a message explaining the situation and asking for help. I also informed him that the new checks had not yet arrived for either account. He never called me back.
That was the last straw for me.
I never received the new checkbooks. When I tried to transfer money from Wells Fargo to my new bank, all my accounts were frozen and so was my access to log in to Wells Fargo online. They supposedly thought the transfer was fraudulent but I had done the online and text verification to prove that they weren't so this shouldn't have happened.
When I went in to close out my accounts and try to resolve the overdrawn account, I explained all of this to the manager I spoke with, Christina Rodriguez. I literally had no access to any money at the bank and was already completely fed up with Wells Fargo before that happened. However, I was not rude, simply very upset. The manager looked at me like she couldn't understand what I was upset about and flatly refused to give any sort of apology for any of this. I have to say that sometimes taking ownership for mistakes and giving an apology can go a very long way - I know she was not personally responsible (and I did express that to her), but as a manager, I might have expected she would apologize on behalf of the bank. Finally, she refused to refund the overdraw fee for the account that I had closed.
If you're considering Wells Fargo, my advice is to run the other way and never look back, especially if you are considering opening business accounts with them. read more
