Alex's Story

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.