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How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

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Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#51
post #46

I don't understand why he's taking this on himself to be honest. If I was incorrectly named in some sort of lawsuit, my first reaction would be to call my lawyer. Who knows if there's also an incorrect arrest warrant out for example?

He hasn't been incorrectly named in a lawsuit. His Bank of America account was mistakenly debited as a result of a legal order against some other, unrelated person with a similar name.

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#52
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Ha, you're right. It's like he was trying to "debug" this problem. PSA dear readers: civil damages are about proximate cause, not root cause.

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#53
post #3

I had the same problem with one of the biggest french bank. I saw an important withdrawal on my account in a city where I wasn't. I called my bank and I explained the situation. They told me I'll get the money back in one day. I asked if I should change my credit card in case it was hacked, they told me calmy it was just an error on their part because another client had the same last name. I just couldn't believe it.

I got a bonus 5k in my account once because a deposit was off by one digit. The bank was very prompt in taking their money back :)

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#54

In 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.

I doubt that would have helped here, since the bank itself did the matching and picked the wrong account.

EU (IBAN to be exact) bank accounts do have a check digit, so typos tend to be caught and result in a transfer being blocked. More relevantly Dutch banks are going to add name checking in 2017 as an extra protection as well. The exact introduction date will vary per bank.

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory: the blog's author would counter argue that BoA didn't perform due diligence in checking that the order mentioned the correct person, and even then, they didn't send the notification on time. The court rules against BoA, and it's up to their lawyers to recoup the money. In practice: BoA pays straight out of their pocket, sends those $3.4K to losses, and shuts this down before the media finds out. And based…

Absolutely correct. This is pocket lint to Bank of America. The big banks operate at an absolutely mammoth scale; BoA has 208k employees. More consequential mistakes than this happen by the thousands every day. There is, quite literally, a budget for it. It is an unfortunate reality for the US that you have to present as a savvy professional, but as soon as BoA is institutionally aware that there is a savvy professio…

I'm ... shockingly interested in this bank letter ghostwriting thing. Could you say more?

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#56
I recently went through a similar legal situation to recover basically the same small amount. I find these incidents to be really interesting and oddly beautiful.

Exploring the broken beaurocracy to retrieve your money is a game; when you finally send enough documents and certified letters to satisfy/scare the otherside it's extremely satisfying.

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#57

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...

This is horrific, but what a fascinating story and outcome. Thanks for sharing

Re: How Bank of America Gave Away My Money

#60
post #59

They have failed to pay back billions, much less $3k. Do not do business with any organization on this list: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list

From your own source, the government _made_ about 2 billion off of the BofA bailout. This includes the 2 billion write-off of TARP funds they gave to the home mortgage group.

Not defending BofA, just saying your source material doesn't make the point you think it does.

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