Thieving banks

[MannyIsGod]

[DMC]

You don't need to move anything to a credit union and that wasn't the point of the OP. He was concerned that a bank is ins uting fees without notifying him. Telling him the solution is to go to a credit union is like giving relationship advice to find another woman. I am pretty sure he's aware there are other banking options and that there are other women.

The comfort some of you find in piling on is hilarious.

Now to address the OP.

I've found that most banks (never dealt with Wells Fargo) do notify you through their own website email that you have to be registered to actually get. I hardly read mine but I am aware it's there.

Sounds like you had a bad experience. I dumped a bank once after they got repeatedly altered their standards (almost daily) as to find loopholes for charging or denying you. I used to write my own expense reimbursement checks and had to have matching numbers on a ledger that the bank had to see. That was their rule. Half the time they wouldn't even ask for it, but if I didn't have it they would say "oh no sir, we always have to see that". I started asking "why didn't you ask for my ledger?" and they would say things like "we don't really need to see that". I finally caught two of these clowns working the same day and confronted them. They both denied knowing anything about it.

So yeah, they you in the drive through.

[DMC]

Lol in law school, we didn't go over what a law firm is.

UT

What school did you attend?

[vy65]

What school did you attend?

ut, tbh

[AFBlue]

Go with Chase

[DMC]

ut, tbh

[The Reckoning]

yeah ever since i moved out of the country its been nearly impossible to deal with wells fargo in transferring my funds into my new account.

to transfer money into an international account, i have to call some number and press and say numbers to get a number...but that original phone number doesn't work, and some chinese lady goes on the phone, yells at me in mandarin and hangs up after 3 seconds.

ultimately i had to give total control of my account over to someone i trust so they can wire my funds to me. ing insane how complicated they made it.

i told them i was moving out of the country but they still canned my card when i tried to use it...then someone stole my number and made a counterfeit card back in the states and wells fargo let it through!


guess who gets stuck with all their bull financing fees and purchase fees? me.

[mouse]

So I've been involved in a long lengthy battle with Wells Fargo

You had me at Wells.

[mouse]

Go with Chase

[boutons_deux]

Problems Riddle Moves to Collect Credit Card Debt

The same problems that plagued the foreclosure process - and prompted a multibillion-dollar settlement with big banks - are now emerging in the debt collection practices of credit card companies.

As they work through a glut of bad loans, companies like American Express, Citigroup and Discover Financial are going to court to recoup their money. But many of the lawsuits rely on erroneous do ents, incomplete records and generic testimony from witnesses, according to judges who oversee the cases.

Lenders, the judges said, are churning out lawsuits without regard for accuracy, and improperly collecting debts from consumers. The concerns echo a recent abuse in the foreclosure system, a practice known as robo-signing in which banks produced similar do ents for different homeowners and did not review them.

"I would say that roughly 90 percent of the credit card lawsuits are flawed and can't prove the person owes the debt," said Noach Dear, a civil court judge in Brooklyn, who said he presided over as many as 100 such cases a day.

Last year, American Express sued Felicia Tancreto, claiming that she had stopped making payments and owed more than $16,000 on her credit card.

While Ms. Tancreto was behind on her payments, she contested owing the full amount, according to court records. In April, Judge Dear dismissed the lawsuit, citing a lack of evidence. The American Express employee who testified, the judge noted, provided generic testimony about the way the company maintained its records. The same witness gave similar evidence in other cases, which the judge said amounted to "robo-testimony."

American Express and other credit card companies defended their practices. Sonya Conway, a spokeswoman for American Express, said, "we strongly disagree with Judge Dear's comments and believe that we have a strong process in place to ensure accuracy of testimony and affidavits provided to courts."

Interviews with dozens of state judges, regulators and lawyers, however, indicated that such flaws are increasingly common in credit card suits. In certain instances, lenders are trying to collect money from consumers who have already paid their bills or increasing the size of the debts by adding erroneous fees and interest costs.

The scope of the lawsuits is vast. Some consumers dispute that they owe money at all. More commonly, borrowers are behind on their payments but contest the size of their debts.

The problem, according to judges, is that credit card companies are not always following the proper legal procedures, even when they have the right to collect money. Certain cases hinge on mass-produced do ents because the lenders do not provide proof of the outstanding debts, like the original contract or payment history.

At times, lawsuits include falsified credit card statements, produced years after borrowers supposedly fell behind on their bills, according to the judges and others in the industry.

"This is robo-signing redux," Peter Holland, a lawyer who runs the Consumer Protection Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

Lawsuits against credit card borrowers are flooding the courts, according to the judges. While the amount of bad debt has fallen since the financial crisis, lenders are trying to work through the soured loans and clean up their books. In all, borrowers are behind on $18.7 billion of credit card debt, or roughly 3 percent of the total, according to Equifax and Moody's Analytics.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=959716&f=19

Just another way the financial sector steals citizens' money.

[boutons_deux]

Will We Have to Wait for a 21st Century Peasants’ Revolt Before Seeing Any Real Change?

Financial criminals throughout history have been beaten, tortured and even put to death, with little evidence that severe punishments have consistently deterred people from misconduct that could make them rich.

The history of drastic punishment for financial crimes may be nearly as old as wealth itself.

The Code of Hammurabi, more than 3,700 years ago, stipulated that any Mesopotamian who violated the terms of a financial contract – including the futures contracts that were commonly used in commodities trading in Babylon – “shall be put to death as a thief.” The severe penalty doesn’t seem to have eradicated such cheating, however.

In medieval Catalonia, a banker who went bust wasn’t merely humiliated by town criers who declaimed his failure in public squares throughout the land; he had to live on nothing but bread and water until he paid off his depositors in full. If, after a year, he was unable to repay, he would be executed – as in the case of banker Francesch Castello, who was beheaded in 1360. Bankers who lied about their books could also be subject to the death penalty.

In Florence during the Renaissance, the Arte del Cambio – the guild of mercantile money-changers who facilitated the city’s international trade – made the cheating of clients punishable by torture. Rule 70 of the guild’s statutes stipulated that any member caught in unethical conduct could be disciplined on the rack “or other corrective instruments” at the headquarters of the guild.

But financial crimes weren’t merely punished; they were stigmatized. Dante’s Inferno is populated largely with financial sinners, each category with its own distinctive punishment: misers who roll giant weights pointlessly back and forth with their chests, thieves festooned with snakes and lizards, usurers draped with purses they can’t reach, even forecasters whose heads are wrenched around backward to symbolize their inability to see what is in front of them.

Counterfeiting and forgery, as the historian Marvin Becker noted in 1976, “were much less prevalent in Florence during the second half of the fourteenth century than in Tuscany during the twentieth century” and “the bankruptcy rate stood at approximately one-half [the modern rate].”

In England, counterfeiting was punishable by death starting in the 14th century, and altering the coinage was declared a form of high treason by 1562.

In the 17th century, the British state cracked down ferociously on counterfeiters and “coin-clippers” (who snipped shards of metal off coins, yielding scraps they could later melt down or resell). The offenders were thrown into London’s notorious Newgate prison. The lucky ones, after being dragged on planks through sewage-filled streets, were hanged. Others were smeared with tar from head to toe, tied or shackled to a stake, and then burned to death.

The British government was so determined to stamp out these financial crimes that it put Sir Isaac Newton on the case. Appointed as warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, Newton promptly began uncovering those who violated the financial laws of the nation with the same passion he brought to discovering the physical laws of the universe.

The great scientist was tireless and merciless. Newton went undercover, donning disguises to prowl through prisons, taverns and other dens of iniquity in search of financial fraud. He had suspects brought to the Mint, often by force, and interrogated them himself. In a year and a half, says historian Carl Wennerlind, Newton grilled 200 suspects, “employing means that sometimes bordered on torture.”

When one counterfeiter begged Newton to save him from the gallows – “O dear Sr no body can save me but you O God my God I shall be murderd unless you save me O I hope God will move your heart with mercy and pitty to do this thing for me” – Newton coldly refused.

The counterfeiter was hanged two weeks later.

Until at least the early 19th century, it remained commonplace for counterfeiters and forgers to be put to death; between 1792 and 1829, for example, notes Wennerlind, 618 people were convicted of counterfeiting British paper currency, and most of them were hanged. Many were women.

During the “Good Parliament” of 1376, public discontent over [manipulation of currency exchange rates similar to the current Libor scandal] came to a head. The Commons, represented by the speaker, Peter de la Mare, accused leading members of the royal court of abusing their position to profit from public funds.

A particular target was the London financier Richard Lyons ….

Initially the government bowed to public pressure. Lyons was imprisoned in the Tower of London and his properties and wealth were confiscated. Other leading courtiers implicated in these abuses, such as Latimer and the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, were banished from court.

Once parliament had dissolved and the public outcry had died down, however, the king’s eldest son, John of Gaunt, acted to reverse the verdicts of the Good Parliament. Latimer and Perrers soon reappeared at the king’s side and Lyons was released from the Tower and recovered his wealth, while the “whistleblower” de la Mare was thrown in jail. The government also sought to appease the wealthy knights and merchants that dominated parliament by imposing a new, regressive form of taxation, a poll tax paid by everyone rather than a tax levied on goods. This effectively passed the burden of royal finance down to the peasantry.

It seemed as though everything had returned to business as normal and Lyons appeared to have gotten away with it. In 1381, however, simmering discontent over continuing su ions of government corruption and the poll tax contributed to a massive popular uprising, the Peasants’ Revolt, during which leading government ministers, including Simon of Sudbury (the chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury) and Robert Hales (the treasurer) were executed by the rebels. This time, Lyons did not escape; he was singled out, dragged from his house and beheaded in the street.

The question now is whether public outrage at the Libor scandal and other financial misdeeds [like these] will lead to fundamental reforms of the financial sector — such as the separation of retail and investment banking or legislation to regulate the “bonus culture” — or just more cosmetic changes that fail to address the structural issues.


http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/...n-bankers.html

[TeyshaBlue]

Here, UTA.

http://www.mycreditunion.gov/Pages/mcu-map.aspx

[SnakeBoy]

I don't know why some of you are jumping on mavs>spurs. I've had a similar experience with bad service, except it was at McDonalds. They have repeatedly served me cold burgers, soggy fries, one time they didn't give me the correct change. It's sucks but I just keep going back. Are all fast food places like this? Anyone know if there are other fast food choices available in this country?

[DMC]

I don't know why some of you are jumping on mavs>spurs. I've had a similar experience with bad service, except it was at McDonalds. They have repeatedly served me cold burgers, soggy fries, one time they didn't give me the correct change. It's sucks but I just keep going back. Are all fast food places like this? Anyone know if there are other fast food choices available in this country?

You gotta go where your family works I think.

[LnGrrrR]

I'm with Randolph Brooks FCU, and I've stayed a member even though I haven't been local to San Antonio for the last 7 years or so.