Complaint Review: Wachovia Bank

My wife has been banking with Wachovia or with its recent acquisition for about 12 years, never has any problems with the institution nor her account. After Wachovia bought out and took over that institution all these problems started. For the last couple of months my wife account has been charged over draft fees even when there was money in the account and the reasons given have been I must say consistent.

Reasons:
1. Wachovia charges items off your account from largest transaction to smallest.
2. The available balance is correct but you can not spend it because you have times on hold.
3. The items on hold are already reflected in the available balance.
4. Its not our fault, it's in the way merchant service makes the charge to us.

If my account shows a hold, I assume that the merchant has already made an inquiry and that the money has been transferred or has been removed from the balance hence only showing what you have available. My wife has had here entire payroll check taken due to over draft charges the last couple of weeks. I mean 332.00 every week for the last 5 weeks with the excuse of NFS'es being applied. When I called the told me that Wachovia deducts from your balance from highest sum to the lowest sum. Even dough no one purchases that way. Some transaction that are older get charged first before some older ones. And then NFS charges are applied because for a particular transaction and at that time you did not have the funds to cover because the bank continues to make charges in that manner.

The bottom line is that once your money get deposited into your account at Wachovia Back, if you deposit 500 dollars at one point that doesn't mean you actually have 500 dollars, you might in their way of conducting business have less because they have had an item on hold for about 4 to in some of our cases 8 days, and if you have a check out for 600 dollars that was on hold and only then came in or a ATM charge on hold for the 600 the you account is not +500 its actually -135 even though that at the time you made the transaction or wrote the check there were according to you balance book may have had 700 dollars in the account, never mind all the other transactions that come after that creating more NFS charges because you account in Wachovia's system your account is in the negative, if you had another two transactions of 25 dollars and 15 dollars respectfully then your is now not -135 but -245 in the negative because of course the two NFS charges.

Its not right to have a system setup this way, nor is it good business practices. So to this regard I will be suing not only Wachovia for the amounts I interpret as having been charged incorrectly but also, making as part of the suit the major merchant services companies, and the banking association part of the suit and then moving on congress with a little help of the media. This is not right. When I buy something I feel I pay for it at that point not two or eight days later paying two or three times the amount for the items because of banking practices.

Aaron
Deltona, Florida
U.S.A.