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Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

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41–50 of 66 posts

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

#41
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.

Agreed. I'm to the point in my life where I'm generally liquid to 2x my monthly expenses - but I've set up an auto-reminder system over auto-pay because of failures in the past.

Maybe it's the former poor person in me, but I don't trust anyone else to take money out of my account.

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

#43

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 w…

Hah! Yeah, probably. No ops person I've met has NOT made this mistake. The more you touch, the more likely you are to break something. It's bound to happen eventually. So, when it does, you buckle down and hope that ALL_CAPS_REG_JOB_X-22 wasn't that important.

A NOC I worked at used to send company-wide pages (in 2008..) whenever something important broke. "Inadvertently" was used maybe once a month!

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

#44
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.

Just my obligatory criticism of Hanlons razor, it's a logically fallacious statement and should be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual discussion where it belongs.

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

#45
post #20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of credit unions have sub-par mobile and web offerings. I have accounts with 2 credit unions but I rarely use them because of this reason. So if you're going to look for a credit union take that into consideration.

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

#46
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.

Just my obligatory criticism of Hanlons razor, it's a logically fallacious statement and should be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual discussion where it belongs.

I generally assume the opposite for any significantly large, powerful, or successful bureaucracy. There is more incentive to be competent than to not be malicious.

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is no fee, keeping it open can help your credit score; a major factor for your credit is what percentage of your available credit you use, so having a credit card you don’t use simply adds to your total available credit.

Honest question: Shouldn't credit be measured solely on the basis of currently available money and monthly income? (+how responsible you were with previous credit repayments) I don't comprehend how having a cc but not actually using it leads to being trusted more

The credit scoring alhorithms don't look at historic balances for credit cards, just current balance and available credit, status and age of the account. Having an account open for a long time that isn't currently late is a proxy for 'has paid bills consistently' even if it may not be accurate. If you regularly were really late, the algorithm assumes your account would have been closed.

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

#48
post #23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For anyone worried about leaving a "big" bank, often credit unions will offer mobile deposit and free (reimbursed) ATM withdrawls. I'm actually happier using a bank with no local branches because there's no more thinking about driving to the "right" ATM. (mine reimburses up to $15/mo which is more than enough for me; these days even the sketchy taqueria ATMs only charge $1.25 or so where it used to be $3+)

No credit union that I've ever seen offers such a thing without balances of $10,000+ and you should probably not be keeping that's much money in a checking account. Credit union and bank fees aren't significantly different from each other. I had a credit union that charged $.30 for using their own ATM.

Best to get a local account without any hoops to jump through to keep it fee free in case you have to go to the bank for some odd reason and open up a fidelity or Schwab account for daily use.

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

#49
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of credit unions have sub-par mobile and web offerings. I have accounts with 2 credit unions but I rarely use them because of this reason. So if you're going to look for a credit union take that into consideration.

In fairness, a lot of banks have subpar mobile and web offerings too.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is no fee, keeping it open can help your credit score; a major factor for your credit is what percentage of your available credit you use, so having a credit card you don’t use simply adds to your total available credit.

Honest question: Shouldn't credit be measured solely on the basis of currently available money and monthly income? (+how responsible you were with previous credit repayments) I don't comprehend how having a cc but not actually using it leads to being trusted more

You have credit available to you and you aren't maxing it out. You're exercised self control.

What you don't do with a credit line is just as important what you do with it.

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