Complaint Review: Swift Financial - M&I Bank

I have had a credit line with Swift Financial for about half a year now. The credit limit was set to $20,000 from the beginning.

Several weeks ago I realized that we needed to borrow some funds to cover business expenses for this month while waiting on some customer's late payments to come in. I had a balance of about $9,600. I wrote my company a line of credit check for $10,000 using up most of the remainder of my credit, leaving a safe $400 or so of available credit.

I deposited the check into my Washington Mutual business checking account. I am told it will take about 5 business days to get full credit for the deposit. About 5 days later I check my bank account with WAMU and see a NEGATIVE 7,300 balance! It turned out that the check had bounced!

Obviously I called Swift to find out why. They told me they had decided to "review" my account and reduced my credit limit upon receiving the check to about $9,700, and denied payment on the check leaving me with only $100 available credit. She admitted that yes, my credit score was still excellent at about 790, and yes I had never made a late payment or had any negative activity with them or any other creditor. But she said they had the "right" to review at any time and deny the check. I am still checking into the legality of that. They did not call to even warn me and I still (after one week) have not received a letter. Of course they didn't even bother to offer to cover the bounced check fee that they caused.

So in summary, I deposited a perfectly valid check for which I made sure I had the available funds, had excellent credit, and did nothing wrong, and they BOUNCED the check with no warning, no call, and no letter. By the way they have the highest interest of any loan I have now at 16%.

I will be doing a credit transfer soon to pay off the balance I have with them as I will never do business with them ever again. Please tell as many people as you can about this story.

By the way, Washington Mutual's way of dealing with the bounced check was to make a bad situation worse. They made ALL my funds unavailable to me (remember the negative balance) even though without the $10,000, which they had NEVER given me available funds for, my available balance would have been about $2000. They admitted that was an error sparked by the bounced check, but perhaps I will file a separate complaint here against them.

Rob
Maitland, Florida
U.S.A.