I've held off transferring to a credit union these past few weeks, largely out of laziness. But this morning I think I finally got the personal kick in the pants that you sometimes need to effect change.
Here's what happened: This month has been a little tight (a few unexpected bills cropping up, payday is tomorrow), and the auto-transfer to my savings account processed itself last night, so my checking account was slightly overdrawn. The bank helpfully emailed me to let me know that my funds were tight, so I rolled back the transfer to get checking back in line.
But here's the weird part. They mailed me at 11:08 PM. At 10:46 PM, I received two classic poorly-spelled "yUor funds are ---available---now!!??" and "g0vernm3nt gr4nts ar3 on th3ir waY!!" spam messages. This in and of itself is not unusual, other than that they got through Gmail's usually-excellent spam filter. I didn't check my mail before bed, so I got all of these at once.
Along with a half-dozen more just like them, cash advances, government grants all addressed to me and personalized with my name, this wasn't a mass email blast. And I've continued to receive these emails all day today, about one every hour.
The thing that rankles me about this is that I'm extremely careful with my email address, and I receive about 4 spam emails a year that make it to my inbox. A dozen or more in a 12-hour span is wildly out of line, and I can only assume that part of Bank of America's "insufficient funds" alert also somehow sells my address to what appear to be the most incompetent spammers in the modern world.
Anyway, now I'm motivated to finally move my money. First off I need to make a polite, but firm, call to customer service alerting them that because of them, my primary email address is no longer as secure as it was and keep asking for supervisors until I get one to explain why money spammers are part of their "account alerts!" program. Second, I'm closing the account as soon as possible and moving to a credit union.
While writing this, I received another one, partial transcript (spammy links removed) below:
_______[{~"••Day-Night.Pay_Day••"|~}]_____
Tell_Us..where_we-should_send*ur..Funds"•
_Confirm.Ur..1OOO_Usd..Delivery..in2minutes!"
_We_Need-Your..Confirmation_for..1OOO,00-deposit"*