This entire fiasco could have been avoided if people were identified correctly. Here's another recent article where simply using "firstname lastname DOB" as a primary key resulted in a collision: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
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Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#32Was the bank really at fault here? From what I see they receive a legal letter from the Sheriff’s Department, and they complied with the letter. The article doesn't say what was included in the letter to the bank, I assume the author doesn't know either. It could have the wrong SSN, or the Sheriff’s Department just looked up the defendant's name, found the author's account number and SSN, and sent those to the bank.
Any major corporation has lawyers (either in-house or on retainer) to verify that court orders are valid before complying with them. Bank of America either chose not to use them, or they didn't do their own due diligence. You can bet this wouldn't have happened if the case involved several hundred thousands (or millions) of dollars.
Court orders have to be specific for a reason - to protect property rights. If some of the information on a court order doesn't match the facts, the proper thing to do is challenge it. Using a warrant as an example, law enforcement isn't allowed to get a judge to allow them to enter a property and just take "anything incriminating". They need to specifically list what they're taking, what case it's in conjunction to, and how the property relates to the case. They're not allowed to take anything that doesn't match the exact specifics of the order.
And if any of that information is wrong, the order is invalid and executing it makes people liable to civil suits. The bank should have challenged it themselves, since they had the necessary information to do so (a name and SSN). Failing that, they should have informed the customer with sufficient time to do it for them.
Bank of America doesn't deserve a pass on this. They screwed up. The court did, too, but it's BoA's job to hold on to people's money and verify identities before handing it out. Had they just told the court that the bank account didn't match the specified person, the court would have taken "no" for an answer.
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#33Likely, there is a dataset on data.gov published by CFPB which consolidates consumer complaints in a federal database.
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/consumer-complaint-database...
BofA ranks first by the total number of cases which is to be expected given their footprint. What's notable is that BofA has actually improved over time.
https://github.com/axibase/atsd-use-cases/blob/master/Consum...
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#34While BofA has its share of blame to absorb here, the specific issue is the lack of support for unusual names such as names containing whitespace. The issue may affect other banks, big or small. I for instance had once to deal with a banking application not supporting non-US phone numbers for 2FA, and yet positioned to serve customers 24x7 globally.
It's not like unusual name support isn't a common issue, but they also had a unique key that they failed to check - the SSN. The name at stake could have just as easily been Bob Smith. The issue in this case wasn't a technological one, but a procedural one. Third-party withdrawal due to court proceedings is an exceptional scenario - not a regular one. Managerial staff would have had to sign off. Someone had to explic…
Sure, the SSN wildcarding was totally inappropriate.
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#35What I don't get: Why would he pursue some court order he's not a party to? The only logical counterparty to this dispute is BoA. They gave away your money without proper title. That shouldn't hold up in court? That they gave some money to the LA Sheriff’s Department, that would be BoA to recoup.
Trouble is, this guy is a random citizen who doesn't know much about how the law works, and so it hasn't clicked who the correct plaintiff would be for his case. He'd probably get told who the right parties to lodge a complaint against, if there was any lawyer willing to talk to him for about 15 minutes, but the last half of the article is basically him being bounced all over California by legal professionals who won…
It's the technical mindset: the court order from Southern California is wrong, let's fix it!
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#36BoA gave everybody's money-substitute-government-credit away, but few have realised it (Even thou BoA says so themselves in their financial statements). So the guy is lucky in a way; he now doesn't trust the thieves. Even fewer realise that the banknotes they are so proudly holding have long ago been defaulted on. It's all running on illusions now. Sell your paper.
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I don't understand, what do you mean by "bailed in"?
A bail-in is when savings are used to finance the bank or the state by turning them into illiquid debt, bank shares, or when they are simply forfeited. This happened in Cyprus in 2013 for example.
If this ever happens in the US it really won't matter where your savings are.
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#38BoA gave everybody's money-substitute-government-credit away, but few have realised it (Even thou BoA says so themselves in their financial statements). So the guy is lucky in a way; he now doesn't trust the thieves. Even fewer realise that the banknotes they are so proudly holding have long ago been defaulted on. It's all running on illusions now. Sell your paper.
Amazing how much down voting one gets for stating facts.
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#39Idiot gives out full name, last four of social, takes time off to visit the bank (??) and also went to blizzconn. Confirmed for sheltered nerd that had no idea how to do anything, bumbled his way through a situation and is surprised at the results.
Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
#40In The Netherlans, but I suspect it is EU wide, they won't check the name at all when doing an ordinary transfer. And this is all banks.
You mean the IBAN? We've used it to send money back and forth between people and companies all the time. For the most part it works. And if there is a dispute or error it can be reversed.