Submissions for the next edition of The Giant’s Shoulders blog carnival are due in the next couple of days. I actually had the paper I’m doing for this one picked out last month even as I was submitting last month’s paper on Lister’s experiments with fermenting milk. I expect I’ll have this month’s written up this weekend…but first, partly as a reminder to myself, I just wanted to say Wells Fargo Bank is a greedy evil bastard.
Seriously, if Wells Fargo Bank was a cartoon character, it’d be someone resembling Snidely Whiplash. I can totally hear the corporation saying “If you don’t give me the deed to your ranch I’m gonna throw you on the railroad tracks!” and twirling its evil little moustache.
What prompts this outburst of a blog post, you ask? Well, even if you don’t ask, I’ll tell you anyway.
I got a phone call this evening. Someone from Wells Fargo Bank calling to tell me they were going to mail me something. “Why the heck”, I thought to myself, “do they need to call me to tell me they’re mailing me something? Why can’t they just mail it?” You see, apparently I may be eligible for over a million dollars of death and disability coverage! And I’ll have sixty days to look it over and it won’t cost me anything! Isn’t that great? But still….”Why do they have to call me to tell me they’re mailing me something? Why can’t they just mail it?”
Here’s why: evidently they feel they’re not getting enough “raping people’s accounts with Mystery Fees” income these days…so unless I’m mistaken, this insurance from Wells Fargo is an “opt out” thing. They’re calling because when they say “hey, we’re doing this and mailing stuff to you”, and I say “Oh, okay”….That’d mean I’d just consented to it. If I get busy or the mailing they send gets “lost” and I forget, Wells Fargo gets to automatically start extracting “insurance premium” mystery fees from my account. (No doubt if they happen to do it on a day when my account is low, they get to charge me an overdraft fee along with the insurance premium. Isn’t that great?) Maybe I’m misinterpreting this, but it sure sounded like this was what was going on from the obfuscated sales-pitch script the caller was going through.
I asked them to go ahead and cancel me before even sending out the stuff, since I already have insurance. We’ll see if they honor my request. I was, incidentally, quite cordial with the poor person who has to do this evil crap for a living in the call center. I’ve done tech support, I know what it’s like having to deal with awful crap that’s not your fault…
Anyway, just wanted to mention this in case anyone else has their bank pull this trick – and so in case I forget and they try to send me the stuff anyway, I’ll hopefully see this post again and be reminded to go through whatever obnoxious “opt-out” procedure I’ll have to deal with…
(I’m reminded of when BlockBuster slipped a tiny, folded notice, buried in a full-size envelope with some other stuff, alerting me in tiny print that they wanted to sell my information to junkmail marketers but they wouldn’t if I filled out their tiny little form and mailed it back to them. As I recall, I had to buy the stamp to mail it, too…)
Anyway, I just had to get that out there. I’ll be back to microbiology and biochemistry shortly. We shall begin with another bit of spiffy practical microbiology from the late 19th century…
This is exactly why we ditched Wells F**kers and went solely with our credit union. Seriously, find another bank, ANY BANK. Wells Fargo is AWFUL.
Well, they annoyed me enough to get off my butt and get my Asterisk box back up and running, complete with the “line disconnected, robocallers go away” tone before it takes a message. Hopefully that’ll deter future parasitic calls of this nature.
Wells Fargo Sucks
I don’t often find a need to use profanities, but I loathe Wells Fargo and their “fees” more than all the profanities in the universe, combined. I’m getting a new bank.
Wells Fargo is Evil with a capital E. Let’s define “Evil” as this: stealing from people like me to perpetuate Republican “old money” ways.
To begin, please take into consideration the fact that Wells Fargo first denied me a job, long ago, upon my graduation from University after I’d earned my Accounting degree. Later, after I’d earned my MBA, people at the institution known as Wells Fargo denied me a line of credit. And, finally, years later when I’d about forgiven them for their Evil ways of the past did I open a checking and savings account at a Wells Fargo. Then did I witness Wells Fargo’s greedy eating away my life savings with exorbitant fees. Once Evil, always Evil it seems.
I’m a simple person. Indeed, despite my Master’s degree in Business Administration and my Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, I’ve made and deposited just about nothing during this past year (365 days). As a truly conservative person, I have been living as a poor and starving peasant. Most of what I have earned and deposited or even been donated (indeed, when things were really bad, I had to accept donations from friends), Wells Fargo stole.
Since I opened my account in August of last year, Wells Fargo has taken from my accounts several hundred dollars. It’s only the beginning of June! My account has been subjected to just about every imaginable and conceivable rip-off . . . from “return statement fees” to “monthly fees” to convoluted “overdraft fees” (the only reason for overdraft (OD) was _BECAUSE_ of the fees).
Wells Fargo steals from the poor and gives to the lazy spoon-fed “old money” types, it seems.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think I should be charged ANY amount of money when I’m entrusting my funds with a financial institution. I shouldn’t be charged fees when I’m giving my money to some institution . . . I should be PAID money for the act of storing my money in that institution. This should not be a relative argument: any amount of money, and for any amount of time seems more than logical. It should matter not that the amount I’m storing and entrusting with a bank is mere pennies — I have been living upon “mere pennies” for quite awhile now, as a starving writer wannabe. The last thing I need is to be robbed by my bank, of all things.
Can any sane person justify this ridiculous insanity?
Let’s let the banking crisis happen again, please. A national depression? I’m all for it. OK, not really, but I would absolutely LOVE to see Wells Fargo collapse or cease to be all for its non-ethical behavior and dishonesty.
Here’s a snapshot of my account activity and the dates over just the past couple of months, cut and pasted, for all the world to see. I am not ashamed of my spending habits; this is honestly the true extent of activity in my account during the periods shown; complete activity between these dates, cut and pasted. Please note that the caps-lock thing is Wells Fargo’s doing, not mine:
05/03/07 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
05/02/07 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
05/01/07 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
04/30/07 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
04/30/07 OVERDRAFT FEE $34.00
04/16/07 MONTHLY SERVICE FEE $12.00
03/09/07 RETURN STATEMENT FEE $3.75
Keep in mind this is only for under two months. Seriously. The only reason that there’s “OD” charge is _BECAUSE_ of the astoundingly ridiculous fees. There’s something wrong when a bank is more active in an individual’s account than the individual. Do you see any activity from me, the customer, during this time?
Wells Fargo stole $54.00 from me in the period of just four days? Wow. And if not that amount, what is the justification for this $69.75 over even two months? What of this “Return Statement Fee” stuff? I requested to cease having paper statements sent to me MONTHS ago, why are they still charging me this fee?
As further illustration, please take note of this snapshot from a prior month. It’s startlingly similar:
12/20/06 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
12/19/06 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
12/18/06 CONTINUOUS OD LEVEL 2 CHARGE $5.00
12/15/06 MONTHLY SERVICE FEE $12.00
12/15/06 OVERDRAFT FEE $33.00
12/14/06 CHECK CRD PURCHASE 12/13 $6.00
12/14/06 OVERDRAFT FEE $33.00
Wow. $89.00 in fees over the period of just six days!? I don’t know, but maybe there should be laws against these things. No I didn’t call them . . . why should I have to?
In between these two examples, when I was able to get my account out of the red, Wells Fargo turned around and stole even more from me. Eventually I figured if I wanted to be able to actually use my own money, I should probably stop depositing it at the bank.
I’ve been robbed by my own bank. I’m getting a new bank.