by Afrabuck
So my wife and I have a vacation account with a large multi state bank. We only use it to hold our vacation fund and have purposely decided to separate it from our savings and checking bank. We place any gifts (Christmas, Anniversary, and Birthdays) directly into this account to save for something fun in the future. When vacation comes we use this account to pay our spending.
The account charges $3 for paper statements (Rip off I know) so we have had digital statements for > 3 years with no fees. Because of this we rarely get mail from the bank to our address. So when we received a statement I was a bit surprised but knew to open it right away. Sure enough they charged us the $3. I called the branch and they confirmed that the digital account was close that is why they sent a paper copy. They could not tell me why the digital account was closed and said that there are no notes associated with the closure.
The teller was nice and explained the bank manager was out and took my info to have her call me back. After > 2 hours I decided to go another route and contacted the national twitter account. Of course they were very quick to respond when I wrote that I am willing to take my complaints to the OCC and Federal Reserve for complaints of deceptive banking practices. They contacted via phone apologized and confirmed again that the online banking was closed. They again told me they did not have any notes about the closure. I asked for a date the online banking was closed and they said they could not provide that info to me. They did reopen the online account and they did refund the $3 fee.
I have sat and thought about it for some time now. Should I still contact the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve to file a complaints for deceptive banking practices. As a large multi state bank could they be doing this to others? I fear they are being deceptive and placing accounts back on paper statements that have little activity in the hopes that the account holders don’t notice the $3 fee. If that is the case the only way they are going to stop is if enough complaints are filed. Why were they so unwilling to provide me information such as the reason why online banking was closed or the date it was closed?