Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#11

Post by pfarnsworth »

I used to work in payments. This happens sometimes, it's a bug it's not something nefarious, and it's really disruptive.

Many, many people will be put in a negative balance. Wells Fargo is probably one of those banks that don't order bill payments chronologically, but probably by amount, so things could get very very messy. There will be a lot of NSF charges that will need to be reversed, or Line of Credit charges for those accounts that have automatic line of credit to avoid NSF charges. But missed payments because of NSF will also be a problem as well, unless Wells Fargo foots the entire extra amount so that customers don't get massively fucked up.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#12

Post by tyingq »

tristor wrote: post #7

I was once double charged on an auto-billed mortgage payment two weeks before Christmas causing all my other bills to bounce. This is why I no longer trust auto billing services from anyone and hate Wells Fargo.

Fwiw, almost a decade with Chase bill pay, and no issues ever. I even once misrouted one due to my own fault, and they resolved it in 4 business days or so. Like every other bank, they have some warts, but bill pay is solid.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#14

Post by strict9 »

Ugh, saw this and checked. Yep, my mortgage payment taken out twice, with a plethora of overdraft protection notices afterward as it keeps taking money out of my other accounts.

Inertia, and the fact I don't want to lose a credit card acct I've had open forever, has kept me with WF. But those two are rapidly becoming nothing compared to all the BS from this bank.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#15

Post by forbiddenlake »

strict9 wrote: post #14

Ugh, saw this and checked. Yep, my mortgage payment taken out twice, with a plethora of overdraft protection notices afterward as it keeps taking money out of my other accounts. Inertia, and the fact I don't want to lose a credit card acct I've had open forever, has kept me with WF. But those two are rapidly becoming nothing compared to all the BS from this bank.

Don't close the credit card, but move everything else away, and put one bill on the card (or just use it twice a year for gum)?

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#16

Post by denvercoder904 »

This happened to my girlfriend's checking account last week. She was charged an overdraft fee because auto pay decided to charge two days earlier. Then all traces of the transaction magically disappeared from her transaction history. Luckily, she took some screenshots of it. We just shrugged it off but I'm going to investigate it now.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#17

Post by HenryBemis »

Probably some job scheduling issue; maybe a job got stuck (dependencies or what have you) and the techie just thought to re-run the job(s) without checking the progress of the "stuck one". I could as well have ran for 99.999% and got stuck on the last account (ZZTop's:) and then it run again "successfully" and the techie went home happy for saving the day. And after all the complains start coming in IT thought just what I thought and went through the support tickets and saw the "Job-Mother-Of-All-Payments" was ran twice.

Now they should be having a chat with their BAs and their Finance on how to reverse the duplicates.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#18

Post by HenryBemis »

thisisit wrote: post #5

They have gone through a massive investigation so doing something like this is strange. So, until proven otherwise it's safer to assume Hanlon's razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

99.9% this is what happened. No bank wants silly mistakes like this on their track record. Reversing all duplicates, cleaning up after alarms & penalties caused by overdrafts due to this mistakes, these are pains that no bank wants.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#19

Post by craftyguy »

forbiddenlake wrote: post #15
strict9 wrote: post #14

Ugh, saw this and checked. Yep, my mortgage payment taken out twice, with a plethora of overdraft protection notices afterward as it keeps taking money out of my other accounts. Inertia, and the fact I don't want to lose a credit card acct I've had open forever, has kept me with WF. But those two are rapidly becoming nothing compared to all the BS from this bank.

Don't close the credit card, but move everything else away, and put one bill on the card (or just use it twice a year for gum)?

I don't think you even need to do that? I had a wells fargo cc open for over a decade with only 1 charge in the previous 8 years. I closed it last year because, fuck wells fargo.

Re: Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

#20

Post by ams6110 »

neosavvy wrote: post #9
thisisit wrote: post #5

They have gone through a massive investigation so doing something like this is strange. So, until proven otherwise it's safer to assume Hanlon's razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

I was just thinking of switching all my accounts from Chase to Wells Fargo because Chase isn't located in my new town. This is a good reminder as to why I should choose a different bank. Thanks for posting.

Use a local credit union. None of the big national banks have demonstrated that they can be trusted.
Post reply on HN