WaMu & predatory lending

Carole writes:

“I have had a terrible experience with WAMU – September 2007 my husband became unexpectedly and totally disabled and we lost his income overnight. We had, as most Americans do, credit card debt. We had a WAMU credit card along with several other cards, gas card, store cards, Wells Fargo etc. We did not want to file for bankruptcy we wanted to pay what we owed but we needed our interest rate reduced and a repayment schedule we could live with. We decided the best course for us was a non-profit credit counseling service. All of our creditors were very cooperative and understood our situation EXCEPT WAMU. WAMU would not work with the non-profit group, they would not work with me, they increased our interest rate to 33% and started tacking on late fees and over the limit fees. I contacted them on numerous occasions to try and work something out, the President of the Non-Profit Counselingng Service tried to talk to them and they would not work with them either. All of this has been documented. I had even written to my Congressman about WAMU. I have been paying our other creditors on time every month since December 2007 with no problems and our balances have been going down and the creditors are getting their money. WAMU has done nothing except added more & more charges to this account. Now, I don’t know who to pay and what, I have not received a bill since August.”

Disputing a charge = cancelled card

Matthew writes:

“On October 6, 2008, I called the WaMu 800 number to speak to a representative about how to dispute a charge which appeared on my account as “Debit without PIN” from an organization in Denver Colorado whom I’ve never done business with in person or online.
After fumbling through their menu system which gives no clear way to speak to a representative for disputing charges (I had to go to the department that handles lost or stolen cards just to get to a live person) and also doesn’t offer a “zero out” ability to just speak to a live person to get to the right department, I finally reached a message that asked if I wanted to take part in a survey after my call was done…of course I selected this option to rate their phone system functionality as substandard.

Finally routed (after 15min and multiple attempts) to the disputed charge claims department (after being told I could have the direct number in case of being disconnected but then being told the number was not releasable) I spoke with Helene and proceeded to tell her that I wanted to dispute a charge on my account for the $50.00 in question. While on the phone with her, the automated survey called me and left a voicemail thereby preventing me from engaging in their survey.

In my conversation with Helene, I explained that I did not do business with this company and wanted to dispute the charge. She then told me that to dispute the charge a new card would have to be sent to me and the existing card would be cancelled. Since I have a business trip in the upcoming week, I asked her if I could postpone the claim until afterwards so that I had the card available for the trip, then then proceeded to tell me that because of my just telling her that I wanted to dispute the charge, she went ahead and cancelled the card because “that’s their policy”. Without any pre-recorded message/warning, nor any verbal warning from her in advance, my card was just cancelled without my indicating I wished to do so. I was told that it was “their policy” when I indicated I had to dispute a charge with Bank of America several years ago and they did not cancel my card as a result of dispute resolution.

This is an unacceptable business practice for banking entity to hold their clients and their client’s money hostage in this manner without warning.

WAMU SUCKS!”

High level WaMu execs axed

JP Morgan axes many high level WaMu execs. Probably a good thing to get rid of the bad customer service juju. (article)

Bad 3rd party check policy & transition chaos

Janni writes:

“Hello,

I wanted to share my particular story of woe. After reading a bunch of the stories on this site, I feel rather hopeless that it will be resolved positively, but maybe sharing my story will help someone else.

I have a personal checking account and a small business checking account with WaMu. I own and operate a sole prop business, and being someone interested in doing things the proper way, I went the full route of registering my DBA and establishing a checking account for my business.

When I went to deposit a check with which a client had paid me at a WaMu ATM, for some reason, it wasn’t reading my business ATM card. As I was in a hurry, and as I’d intended to pay myself by writing myself a check from my business checking account to my personal checking account anyway, I thought it would save me a step if I endorsed the check over to myself and deposited it into my personal checking account. As long as I noted it properly in my records, no harm and no foul, right? When I was first working and didn’t have a checking account, I endorsed my checks over to my mother and she was able to deposit them and give me the money. I’m certainly no banking expert, but I didn’t see any great flaws of logic in this plan. This was on 9/15/08.

Apparently, despite my name being on both accounts (they have you register your personal name AND your DBA when you open a small business account as a sole proprietorship), they decided they could not accept the check. “3rd party check,” they wrote (which I had to look up, because I’d never seen the phrase before), and they returned it to me via postal mail.

Here’s where my major gripe comes into play: I’m signed up to receive e-mail notifications from WaMu. They’re quite good about sending notifications that a new statement is ready, and (of course) that a new NSF notice is ready. I’ve had a few of those in the past. They’ve been my fault, and I’ve sucked it up and paid them as I’m not someone who believes in wasting peoples’ TIME for problems that are mine and not theirs.

You’d *think* that they’d send out an e-mail notification to inform you that a check you’d deposited into your checking account (and upon which, presumably, you were thusly depending for funds) was being returned, no matter what the reason. Pretty important information, right?

They never sent such a notification. I use their online banking service regularly, but I definitely don’t check my account every day. I wasn’t aware that I needed to. I’m willing to bet that most people (apart from people for whom banking is a profession and/or obsession in some way) probably don’t. If, like me, you don’t check it every day, maybe you might want to start—particularly if you’re a WaMu customer.

So here I am, going about my business, using my debit card to pay for things (I don’t like to carry large amounts of cash on me, and I also don’t like to use credit unless I have to). And paying bills electronically and via check. All the while, blissfully unaware that the money I *thought* was in my account to cover all these things wasn’t in it at all!

I didn’t receive my returned check in the mail, or know that anything was wrong, until nearly two weeks later.

So, of course, I totted up a bunch of NSF fees. I think we’re at either number 6 or number 7. I’m too angry to log in right now and check.

I’m more than willing to accept the consequences of my mistakes—when they’re *my mistakes*. Maybe I should have known about their “3rd party check” policy. But it seems awfully shady that they couldn’t be bothered with notifying me (and I’ve been a customer of theirs for at least 3 or 4 years now) that a check I’d deposited was being returned. In fact, if one were supremely cynical, it might almost look as though they were hoping I’d rack up a bunch of NSF fees that they could pocket.

I attempted to resolve this by telephone. Over an hour later and full of disgust, I gave up. I then sent an e-mail via their secure system. I was informed that they take banking errors very seriously, and after a thorough review of my complaint, they could find no such error, and could not reverse any of the fees. This response and “thorough review” came less than an hour after I submitted my complaint via e-mail. Even assuming someone actually sits there and reviews each e-mail as soon as it comes in (an idea which is doubtful, at best), I sincerely doubt they would have come to that conclusion so quickly. More likely is that it was an arbitrary response. More cynically, of *course* a gigantic behemoth of an organization isn’t going to find an error within itself when it’s left in charge of policing itself!

I responded to this e-mail and politely but firmly stated that my problem was less with their returning the check, and more with the fact that they didn’t bother to inform me that they were doing so—almost as though they wanted to do it as shadily as possible in order to slide in some nice fees for themselves. I double-checked the notifications they’d sent out, just to be sure it wasn’t a problem on the end of my e-mail (I’d been pretty sure it wasn’t). Indeed, no such notice was ever sent.

I have no idea if I’ll get a response. While mentally, of course I was cursing a blue streak, it usually elicits greater levels of cooperation if I at least try to be civil.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. The people at my local branch, while friendly, seem a bit helpless.

Janni”

(My response)

Hi Janni,

Apparently you are not the only one to have trouble with 3rd party checks and WaMu; they don’t appear to accept them at all. I was unable to find information with Google or on the Chase website on their policy for 3rd party checks, so I don’t know how this might change in the future.

In the future, the best way might be to cash the check at the bank where it was issued, and then deposit cash.

In my personal checking account, I get around the trouble with overdrafts by having a credit line tied to my checking account; whenever a check would take me past zero balance, it automatically draws from my credit line. It costs about $5 each time I do that, much less than an overdraft and the event doesn’t have negative connotations.

The best advice I can give you is to move to another bank.

I also bank at First Republic Bank, where I don’t have a credit line on the account. When we occasionally have an overdraft, they call us immediately, hold the check, and allow us to put money in the account so the check won’t bounce. It still costs us an overdraft fee but the recipient of the check won’t get a bounced check back, and no other checks will bounce if we fix the problem right then (i.e. figure out why we are short in the first place).

Peter

Things are crazy at WaMu

A reader writes:

“I called WaMu yesterday. When I was telling a manager that I never received the free checks they said they’d send in the mail, and they took a hefty fee from my checking account.

The manager on the phone was rude by saying “not gonna happen” whenI tried talking over and over again. Then I called back and the lady is losing her argument with me and she transfers me back to the automated telephone menu, the next person hung up on me and I lost an hour of my life to these bastards. I hate WaMu and I hope we don’t bailout the banks. I love the House Rep.s for rejecting the bill.”

It’s the poor leadership

“R” writes:

“Hello,

I am actually writing because I don’t entirely agree that washington mutual’s customer service sucks. I am only saying this because I worked there for a long time and also had an account there. However, the same can not be said for Washington Mutual CEO Kerry Killinger. Kerry Killinger’s ridiculous antics and total greed have completely degraded the moral of employees. Washington Mutual in Seattle pays their tellers 11.00 dollars an hour to be berated, belittled, and generally used as a doormat while Kerry Killinger collects 300 times his salary as a nice little bonus (highest paid CEO on the west coast anybody?). The company also expected female tellers to wear shirts stating “WOOHOO” right across their chest region, often resulting in female employees being called woohooters girls. Try dealing with every scum bag in Seattle humilating you by make obscene comments and you may have an idea as to why our tolerance may be lower than it should… I don’t agree with the companies policies and selling information to other companies, nor do I agree with the system they use to “sell sell sell”… and I most definitely think the telephone banking system is completely flawed and horrible… but I am beseeching on behalf of the littler people of the company, be nice to the tellers… they don’t get paid nearly enough to be harrassed or screamed at. If you want to scream at someone, Go ahead… just ask for the district manager. Please note that I do understand your frustrations and I am only writing this because I have lived through the horrors of being a teller at a company that doesn’t do anything for the little people… who ironically do EVERYTHING for the company.

Thank you…

Former WaMu teller

p.s. I have had bad experiences with branches other than mine as well, but there are a lot of nice people that work for this questionable company.”

(Peter’s note: Thanks for your email. Thanks for reminding me that in the whole debacle there are innocents caught in the middle. I could not agree with you more about the poor management that WaMu has had; I experienced this myself dealing with the corporate office. I also think the poor leadership has put incapable people in the wrong positions, which is why so many people are writing me about dealing with incompetents at WaMu. But surely there are a lot of competent people that just want to do their jobs. My heart is out to them, as I have worked in dysfunctional companies before, and it is no fun.)

13 days for deposit to clear? WTF?

Alex writes:

“I’ve had several gripes with WaMu recently, and it has been with my online checking and savings accounts. No credit card problems or arguments about rates: these are problems with the fundamental mainstay of any deposits-based bank. That ought to tell you to run for cover if they can’t even run their basic business correctly!

Here’s my first and most recent gripe: they charged me $10 for an INCOMING wire. I have never seen that before. It might be standard practice nowadays, but I always thought that you pay that outgoing wire fee with whatever company/bank you wire from. I don’t know why your receiving bank would levy a fee on INCOMING funds – those are funds that they will be able to lend off of – but they took a $10 “commission” for doing nothing other than saying “yes, we will accept this wire.” Bastards.

My bigger gripe concerns a large deposit made recently. I had never had deposit problems until then; once in a while I would send in a deposit, and it would get posted almost immediately to my ledger balance, and after 2-3 days on my available balance. However, with this deposit, it took them 13 business days, 15 if you count Saturdays. I count Saturdays because they are open, which means they are doing business, which means they could be processing customer requests. They claimed that my deposit would be available in 11 days. That is absurd to begin with, but the fact that it took 15 business days (which equated to almost three weeks) is criminal. It basically means that WaMu took the liberty of sitting on MY money for almost three weeks, collecting interest on it, and told me I could not touch it.

I called numerous times with complaints, and no one was able to help. No one even offered to ask a superior or see what they could do. Along the way I changed my online bank code, and WaMu’s phone-banking system didn’t process THAT for a few hours, so I couldn’t even access my accounts. That’s a chump mistake in these days of computers and high-technology.

What REALLY made me mad was comparing WaMu’s service to that of my other bank. After my deposit at WaMu finally cleared, I transferred most of it to another bank. This bank was able to process the whole thing within 3 business days … THREE, compared with 15 for WaMu.

I am in the process of closing my account with WaMu, and would highly advise you do the same, before their new CEO takes some money from you for either making a wire into their bank, or – hell – for his great new salary.”

Preapproved = DENIED

Bill writes:

“OK so I have to say, after a 5 year long divorce, my credit got dragged through the mud.

Wamu, on many occasions recently has offered me a line of credit. Probably something small, hey I’m down for that, as I tend to NOT use credit cards. When my friends from high school got those shiny platinum cards and went spend-crazy, to this day they are still paying them off. I was not one of them and am proud of that.

But WAMU……Shame on you. Four times I’ve been in line at the branch and was told “You’ve been pre-approved for a credit card”.

Finally I bit. Sat down in the branch, filled out all the forms (took 30 minutes rather than the 5 that I was assured) only to be DENIED.

Why would A bank outright LIE to it’s customers? SO, it’s become my mission today to alert as many people of the absolute CAVALIER attitude WaMu holds against it’s customer base.

And going from the newspaper headlines today, WaMu really NEEDS to keep it’s customers happy.

So WaMu, you can lie to others, but as for me I am the type that wants to beat a dead horse. Your customer service in the Philippines obviously doesn’t know about the American banking debacler, as they are more condescending than anyone “in country” could be in these hard economic times.

And as always, I will pay in full IN CASH.

And as for my account, I will be closing it by next week’s end.

I’m going with a small Credit Union who actually CARES about it’s business.”