World Savings Bank Advertising Deception
In the state of Texas, World Savings Bank released 100,000 mail out advertisments offering a 5.01% interst rate on a five month CD ( a pretty good rate given current interest rates around 3 and 4%). ..So off I went down to World Savings to move money from a money market account into this great offer. Halt! Buried in the fine print in tiny little letters on the last page is a statement basically saying the money has to come from a non-World Savings account.
Why send such a thing to people who are already customers? And, some reward for being a faithful customer! Even the branch manager mentioned that six or seven customers had already come down to the bank only to discover the same thing and that his calls to regional big wigs had fallen on deaf ears (even after a custer angrily withdrew $90,000!)
As usual with most customer saving departments, the World Savings bank customer service person in California at the headquarters really didn't care about the logic involved. He was very snide and knew it was plain "tough luck" on my part. It is my experience with most banks, that the customer service department is one huge firewall to keep the cattle, I mean, customers away from the big wheels.
The long and short of it is, it's a very deceptive ad campaign that will probably make more people leave in disgust, then the number of new customers it was meant to attract.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
richard
woodland hills,California,
this wasn't false advertising
#2UPDATE EX-employee responds
Tue, April 23, 2002
In response to the false advertising report, it isn't the corporation's responsibility for the customer to read the fine print.
It is the consumer's responsibility to read everything about the product that they might potentially invest in.
Also, this advertisement was put out to you present customers to entice you to invest even more into the company.
It is a great product rate, that is hard to match, but there are ways around the rules. John Q Public isn't intelligent enough to withdraw all of the funds that they plan on investing into this vehicle, deposit it into a liquid account at a different bank, then come back with a new cashier's check from that other bank the n buy into it.
World Savings is a great provider of financial services that focuses on the "Mom and Pop" customer service that you wouln't get at other institutions.