Bank of America sucks!!!

[tomato]

bailout, thanks for taking the time to write this post, it certainly provides most interesting information.

Originally Posted by BailOut

BofA has had problems for quite while now. When my wife and I first met over 10 years ago her account was with BofA. Her debit card number was her login to their online banking system (!) and her pin code was the password (!!!). I griped to them about this early on and was rebuffed.

Fast forward to 2000. She was still a Windows user at the time and there were no less than 4 cookie exploits for Internet Explorer. I again warned BofA about it and they basically told me that I didn't know what I was talking about. Within weeks many mainstream websites that served off of the Windows platform has been compromised and were combing visitor's cookies when they used IE.

Sure as hell, 3 weeks later a charge showed up in our account for a losing $1,000 bet at an online sports book. I checked out the sports book's site and they didn't even require an expiration date, name or anything else for a transaction... just a credit card number.

BofA took 3 weeks to give us our money back, and when they mentioned they would issue my wife a new card we said, "Don't bother." and merged our accounts into Wells Fargo.

Are you saying that some hacker sites highjacked the information contained in the cookies?

Let me provide you with some warnings concerning Wells:

- Any transaction that favors the bank will take place either immediately or overnight; any transaction that favors you will take 2-5 business days.

Yes, I would agree with that, which can be infuriating at times.

Without any warning they shut off our card last Tuesday. It wasn't just us... thousands of Shell/Citi customers had their accounts closed. We were all given some bullshit excuse that it was "something on your Experian credit report... a change in your FICO score". What made no sense from the start was that I'd just pulled our credit reports not 10 days earlier (a semi-annual event) and not only was nothing negative shown, but our FICO scores had gone up by roughly 30 points due to refinancing our home and some other dealings. Your FICO score is also not a static measurement, but a constantly evolving number. I mentioned all of this to the Citi CSR and he made it clear that it only said "something" on my Experian report, not necessarily something negative.

The accounts were closed, conveniently, on the 13th, because the billing cycle ends on the 14th and that's when they would normally disburse everyone's rebates. The fine print in the contract lets them keep the rebates if they close the account for any reason.

So, aside from the hassle of losing our primary credit card, we also lost over $50 in rebates that were due to us.

I'm always leary of these types of cash-back and rewards type of cards. For one thing, many come with fees and fine print and loopholes nobody understands, and they find ways to weasel out of their promises too easily. Closing an account on you is cold!! They usually just change the terms of the contract. I've only lost my airline miles, but that was enough of a warning for me to understand that there is probably no free lunch so why bother, I don't earn/spend that much money so the rewards would be negligible anyway .

I also just signed up for an American Express Blue Cash card because I don't want to get stuck having our only credit card ripped out from underneath us like Citi just did. I will be adding a 3rd card, likely from a local credit union, in order to add some extra credit security and to help out our FICO scores by keeping less than 30% of our total available consumer credit used at any moment.

I don't like American Express, because they charge a huge fee to merchants (used to be something like 15% of the transaction?) Small businesses are having a hard enough time as it is, and many do NOT take AmEx. Plus it's not free or at least it wasn't when I looked into it.

If you want banking horror stories then try to get a credit card through Barkley's (spell?) back East.