This story precedes the Occupy Wall Street movement by years and isn't one of political activism – I was just a consumer tired of my BofA account. But I suspect it might resonate a bit with the numerous closure stories now circulating in these parts, and I'm the happier for getting it off my chest. Doubtless a pattern will be apparent.
Prologue: I went to Europe on vacation one summer, without notifying BofA. After one successful ATM withdrawal, my account was frozen and I was no longer able to get cash. Thankfully, my credit card remained active and I was able to do things like pay for food and lodging, but I spent several frantic days trying to phone BofA long distance. I wasn't too careful about how I did so – I just put calls on my credit card which had, in an earlier trip (years before) been economical.
The main problem was that the number of the back of my ATM card only received M-F/9-5 service. I spent an entire weekend in suspense about my monetary situation and then probably an hour on hold with various operators, before I got access to the card again. In the process, I racked up around $100 in phone bills on my credit card. Again, I should have bought a phone card and limited my exposure that way, but when you're short of cash you may not think clearly about such things. When my next credit card bill arrived, I phoned BofA irately and demanded that they cover it. They had, I argued, a responsibility to do due diligence to - perhaps - phone provided contacts of mine to ask if my overseas usage was legitimate, and to operate a customer service number listed on the card for overseas customers. Of course they didn't offer me anything, and left me with an itching need to leave them, which I acted on at the next convenient opportunity.
To be clear, here, my beef isn't with the safeguard itself, but with the fact that BofA's customer service was so minimal. They neither considered the possibility of contacting me nor staffed a number on a 24/7 basis. They of all people should know that it's a serious matter to leave a customer without money in a foreign country.
And Then: A couple of years later, I had a one-year job in a state where BofA didn't bank. This provided an opportunity to finally cut the cord: I established a new account and carefully drew down on my BofA account, closing it out to the last penny. I thought I'd done it cleanly, but there was one thing I'd neglected; I'd earlier set my insurance to auto-bill from my BofA account. After all, one doesn't want to find oneself without insurance.
Before I could redirect my insurance company, two attempts to bill $25 were made. BofA, noting that I had a zero balance, rejected both.
No harm, no foul, right?
I began to get correspondence from BofA demanding that I place $120 in the account? Say what? They felt entitled to $50 for the money that they didn't pay to the insurance company, plus another $70 in penalty fees. At which point, as I recall, I would have reestablished a zero balance. Joy.
I had reached the point where I began to feel that my bank was treating me like an ATM.
I banked with BofA for five solid years. My account balance for much of that time was pretty substantial (at least it seemed that way to me). Their crappy customer service had served me badly during that time overseas. It was time, I thought, for some human being to intervene, note that the account hadn't been overdrawn, and choose to walk away. But that would have involved an apparently unattainable degree of humanity on the part of BofA.
Of course that didn't happen, and BofA has stalked me for the past few years with collector calls. They occasionally phone my parents' house and ask for me, though I ceased living there a long time ago. Collector calls plagued my cell phone at first, though they've died down as I learned to recognize them and have pegged the numbers to a silent ringtone that I installed. BofA, last I knew, now says I owe them somewhere north of $300. I have the funds, but I will bury them in a cave on the moon before I give that rotten bank another cent.
What this adds to the mass exodus from big banks, I don't know. This is a pretty idiosyncratic story, and predates the current bank exodus by years. But I did feel like sharing it, and perhaps it strikes a chord with some of you. It's time to leave these monsters behind.