At War With Wells Fargo

I am at war today. It is a war against Well Fargo. I HATE them. They bought our original World Saving Mortgage from Wachovia Bank. I had a huge run-in with them in the 90s and never trusted them. Because of that, I have walked our mortgage payments into the old Wachovia Bank branch every month for over a year.

Yesterday, I tried to make my payment and the sweet teller said, "You are .01 off!" Suddenly, the amount was different from even the monthly statement by .01. Weird? I had to change the check as the computer would not accept my normal amount.

Why fight .01? Why question it?

I smelled a rat and I was right.

The teller advised me to call the 800 number on the top of the statement. When I got home after my hair cut, I did just that. Guess what? No humans were available in the prompts. Just recorded data. Frustrating. So at 3:30, I drove into town to the local branch.

I was clearly very angry. They assigned a banker to me who used magic phone numbers to talk with the proper person. She told me that they opened an escrow account on June 18th because we had not paid our property taxes in April.

I was stunned. We paid them from our Mongan Stanley account. We had not received notification from the county that they had not received our taxes. We had not received notification from Wells Fargo that they were opening this escrow account.

What really angered me was when I asked about the .01 difference in my bill. "That is because we opened up an escrow account." I asked, "So, had I just mail the check in with the statement amount (less .01), would you have rejected it?" The answer was, "Yes" and we would have now had a late house payment on our credit report.

This type of business practice was why I never trusted Wells Fargo. That is REALLY dirty. No warning. No notice that the amount had changed.

Where do we go now? I am leaving within the hour to pick up a copy of my cancelled check from Morgan Stanley - about 40 minutes away - then to the county to talk with the tax collector to make sure they show that we are paid. I will ask for a stamp or something to prove that. Then, I will be going to Wells Fargo and ask why they decided to open this escrow account, ask for a copy of any notification from the county that our taxes were not paid, leave the proof with them and then just one more thing - we will be filing a complaint with the Federal Reserve.