This post, The Worst Banks in America, on Five Cent Nickel caught my eye since I really dislike my current bank, Chase.  According to the post, the three worst ranking banks are Chase/WaMu, Bank of America, and Citibank.  I am sooooo not surprised.

My husband was a Bank of America customer before we met, but awful customer service motivated him to switch.  I was a member of a credit union but it was too far away to continue being useful.  When we got married, we opened a joint Washington Mutual account.  We were actually very happy WaMu customers…we even found the best mortgage rate from them in 2007 – 5.375%.

Then everything crashed, WaMu became Chase, and we were charged for our mortgage twice.  How exactly would you react if $1800 went missing from your checking account when you were only expecting one $900 charge?  Well, that is probably better than me.  I was ticked.

I promptly called customer service.  I was told that their systems were down but that they’d start the process manually.  A week later I still hadn’t heard anything.  I called again and was told that they were working on it but it could take up to 2 weeks total.

A week after that I called again and was told it could take 2 more weeks.  At that point, I lost all patience and asked to speak to someone with more authority.  After being passed around and put on hold for at least 45 minutes, I finally spoke with someone that told me that the review department had agreed to speed things up but it was impossible to actually talk to them.  I was completely frustrated and told them that I was writing an official complaint (which I did) and filing a report with the Better Business Bureau (which I also did).

I had a $900 refund about a week later – 22 days after the accidental double charge.  That was about a week before they just took it back for my next payment. 

Let’s just sum it up by saying, I’m not a happy Chase customer.  We were looking into other options, but decided it would be simpler to keep them as our brick and mortar bank while shoveling all our money into ING.  The only good thing I can attribute to Chase is their low-hassle ATM’s…but even those have issues sometimes and then you have to wait for the bank to open to get anything done.

Do you have any bad bank stories?