What actions can I take against a bank for lack of customer service?
Figure out who regulates the bank. Complain to your state banking/consumer affairs department. Complain to your state Attorney General. The Feds regulate most banks too, there are several different agencies, and I believe the way they regulate banks has changed recently. Try contacting the US Comptroller of the Currency. I don't think the verbal confirmation from the branch manager is worth anything, unless you got it in writing it basically never happened. That said, what did you sign exactly? An application? I'd think they would be well within their rights to deny that, no matter what the branch manager said. If you actually signed a binding contract between you and the bank, things would be different but the fact that 'approval' was mentioned suggests that all you and the bank signed was an application and the bank manager made some unreasonable promises he or she doesn't want to be reminded of now. If the complaints department can't get off their collective backsides, a firm but polite letter to the CEO's office might help, or it might end up in the round filing cabinet. But it's worth a try. Other than that, if you are unhappy enough to go through the pain, you can try to remortgage with another bank and end the business relationship with your current bank. You can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service in Australia.  I've never used them in particular but generally organizations will respond much faster once you get the ombudsman involved. However, since you say they've now kept their promises, the ombudsman is unlikely to do much more than listen sympathetically.
"Typically, the CC company itself won't follow the customer very far upon a default (though it certainly can act as its own debt collector, or hire an agency for a fee to do the collection).  What most often happens: Once they do that, assuming they win the lawsuit, they can do the following: They cannot ""force"" you into bankruptcy, but they might make it so you have no better options (if bankruptcy is less painful than the above, which it often is).  They certainly can (and will) report to the credit bureaus, of course.  For more information, Nolo has a decent help site on this subject. Different jurisdictions have slightly different rules, so look up yours.  Here is an example (this is from Massachusetts). Not every debt is sued for, of course; particularly, pay attention to the statute of limitations in your state.  (In mine, it's seven years, for example.)  And it's probably worth contacting someone locally (a legitimate non-profit debt relief agency, or your state's help agency if they have one) to find local rules and regulations." I wouldn't lose any sleep on it until it actually happens.  I believe generally the agreement of the merchant with the credit card company says they must submit to the company's arbitration.  If they come back to you, I would definitely get in touch with Visa to complain. Here's some great advice on dealing with unscrupulous debt collection, the main points being It's actually you that should be threatening to sue them if the repairs were incompetent or dangerous! Better suited to /r/personalfinance, but you definitely owe the money. Unless you had something in writing that they were going to send a bill to a certain address, it's your responsibility to pay. Hell, even if you did have something in writing that said they'd send the bill somewhere else it's still your responsibility to pay even if the bill doesn't show up. You know you owed them money.  When your parents didn't get the bill, you should have called the company to ask about it. It's your responsibility to follow up since you're the one that owes the money.  What did you think would happen when you went 5 months without paying $312 that you knew you owed? "The bank provides a service that the customer voluntarily agreed to - the bank will provide funds to the customer now and the customer will pay back those funds plus interest in the future.  The arragement wasn't forced onto the customer. The government, on the other hand, takes money (the exchange is not volutary) from people to provide a ""service"".  This frustrates a lot of people - myself included - since people do not have a choice.  They must pay the taxes or go to jail (or have their house confisicated, wages garnished, etc.).  It gets even more frustrating when the government takes money from the people and gives it to the banks, auto companies, insurance companies, etc.." "As far as the banker himself goes, it's a customer service issue.  WF is not going to tell you about their internal discipline (or oughtn't, anyway), other than potentially to confirm that the banker does or does not still work there; that's the closest they should get to telling you about it.  I'm a (very) former retail manager, and that's absolutely the most I'd ever do in a case like this; and trust me, even with good customer service reps, you get requests to fire someone a lot, sometimes valid, sometimes not. You did the correct thing from your end: you brought the issue to their attention.  Despite the quota, it's (hopefully) not permitted to sign people up without their permission (since that's illegal!), and I can say that in my retail experience, with these promotions with great incentive to cheat in this manner, one of the main things our loss prevention department did was to monitor data to see if people were illicitly signing people up for cards or otherwise cheating the system.  That could be a very bad thing from a customer service point of view and from a legal point of view. What you should have done (or possibly did, but it's not clear in your post) is, after you reported the issue, asked for a re-contact on a particular date in the future - not ""after you've looked into it"", but ""Next friday I would like to get a call from you to discuss the resolution.""  Again, they're not going to tell you the discipline, but they should tell you at least that they've investigated it and will make sure it doesn't happen again, or similar.  It's possible they will want more information from you at this point, and this is a useful way to make sure that request doesn't fall off of their plate.  They should be able to, at least, tell you if there was a perceived issue on their end - it might be something meaningless to you, like ""He thought you said to sign up"", or something more descriptive, like ""He pushed the button to send you a notice, but our computer system screwed that up and made it an application"".  You never know these days how easy it is to screw these things up. Now, they certainly should have fixed the issues on your end.  Hopefully they did whatever you needed them to do banking-wise, or else you withdrew your money and went somewhere else.  If not, follow up with that supervisor's supervisor, or go up a level or two to a regional director or equivalent.  They may not be able to cancel the card for you, but the other banking-related things they certainly should fix.  The card you probably just have to cancel and be done with. As far as the misuse of personal information, one thing I'd consider doing is placing a freeze on your credit report.  Then this could never have happened - you would have to lift it to have your report pulled to be given the card.  This is not free, though, so consider this before doing this." My favorite part about using a local credit union is, if I have an account issue, I can just call up and talk to someone who works five minutes from my house without *ever* punching numbers into an automated answering system. Good luck doing that with Bank of America. Same thing as for any debt: bank sues you, you lose, you are in an even deeper hole because you now owe them for the cost of the court case, your credit rating goes into the toilet, you may even have trouble retaining/finding a job. Being stupid is always more expensive. "I don't know what the legal situation in the US is, but in the UK I would take the bank to court. Your case is simple - you never authorised the transactions, and they have provided no evidence to you that you did. The details of the VISA ""zero liability"" promise you mention may also be worth quoting as it ought to form part of your contract with the bank." I had a similar situation a while ago, and here's what I learned: What are our options here to ensure that this company can't retry to take our money again via ACH? Close existing account and create a new one that has different account number? Yes. As a temporary solution keep ~$0 balance in the account so that their request for $840 can't be fulfilled? However, would our bank incur any fees because of insufficient funds each time the other company tries to charge us again? Bad idea. You may incur penalties for returned payment, or the bank may honor the payment and charge you overdraft fees. Provide to our bank the service termination notice that proves that we   are not in business with the other company anymore and effectively   block them. However, termination notice has only our signature Bank doesn't care. ACH withdrawal is akin to a check. The assumption is that the other side has entitlement. You can put stop payment once its processed and try to reverse it claiming fraud, but the end result will be #1: you'll end up getting a new account set up, while they try to recover the money. This is one of the reasons I'm reluctant allowing standing ACH authorizations any more. Generally, the American banking system is very much geared against the consumers, and in many ways is very retarded. In a more advanced countries (which is almost any other country than the US), the standing withdrawal authorization goes through your bank and can be revoked. That sucks.  If BofA is taking responsibility for the insurance payment, then they should..., well, take responsibilty - full responsibility.  I hope these people get reimbursed fairly.  Didn't their insurance company contact them about the policy?  If not, I'd certainly be shopping for a new insurance company, and possibly I'd include them in a lawsuit.  The insurance company should be contacting the bank **and** their customer.  Mine sent me a couple of letters, saying a copy was sent to the bank (although I think they still had the original bank, not BofA).  But BofA had recently paid the premium, so they ignored it - basically dropped the ball.  When I got the 2nd letter from the insurance company, I called again, and the guy at BofA got right on the ball, checked it out, and fixed it very quickly, then helped me cancel my escrow so I could handle it directly in the future.  Perhaps I was lucky to get someone who cared about their job enough to follow through.  But I also jumped in to make sure it got taken care of, so if he hadn't, I would have been bothering them until they did. "Great, I wonder how I the customer will be paying for this. I don't know exactly when it happened or the specifics but BOA lost 500 million in some bad loan or something a while back and a month later started taking on fees to what used to be free services. They started charging 5 dollars for a replacement debit card and other stuff like that. Their explantation for it was ""we have the right to make a profit"" when really it just seems they were covering their asses. Instead of cutting costs internally like an ethical/responsible company would, they make their customers pay for it. As soon as my credit card account goes up for renewal I am done with that bank." "You need to consult a lawyer in your area. Generally speaking though, if you breach the T&C, they don't have to follow them either, which means that whatever they were responsible for in those terms and conditions, they're no longer responsible.  So if you get hacked, and they can prove you breached T&C by sharing your credentials, they are absolutely off the hook for your financial losses. So if they detect you're in breach, they may record it and not pursue any other action unless/until you have an issue, in which case they say, ""they're in breach, see here, here and here.""  Or there may be regulations that require they notify you of their detection of the breach.  If this sort of regulation exists, I suspect that the notification would also include a termination of all accounts as well.  I can also picture situation where a company might have such a policy built into the T&C so that they can steer as clear as possible from any situations involving liability and cyber-crime in the same sentence. My suggestion would be to take the terms and conditions for your banks to some kind of legal clinic and get them to explain the parts that you do not understand." Bank of America is the worst. Once I had a joint account with another individual that I had funded out of my account to make payroll.   When I found out that he had screwed two other people by stealing the payroll money I decided to disburse it myself and transferred it back to my corporate account on which I was the only signer.  He went back to the bank and effected a withdrawal from my account to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, put the money in the joint account and removed me as a signer.   The bank wouldn't give me my money back and I never collected from him.  Another time I tried to close my sons' accounts which were in inactive status.  Every day for a week they told me they could not close the account until it was active, but they were working on making it active.  Chase could do this in a minute.  I finally went to a branch and loudly informed the manager that maybe the bank was insolvent and that I should call the FDIC to see why they won't release my money.  He wanted to take me into his office.  I told him loudly, I know all about DDAs, Savings and CDs, I have run deposit operations for a major bank and wrote software to process them.  Just put a hold on the account, write me two cashiers check and offset them with a suspense voucher.  You do know how to write a suspense voucher don't you? It's just a general ledger entry to a suspense account.  Well he was so embarassed he would do anything to get me out of the branch and gave me the cashier's checks.  Fuck B of A. "From the bank's perspective, they are offering a service and within their rights to charge appropriately for that service. Depending on the size of their operation, they may have considerable overhead costs that they need to recoup one way or another to continue operating (profitably, they hope). Traditionally, banks would encourage you to save with them by offering interest growth on your deposits. Meanwhile they would invest your (and all of their customer's) funds in securities or loans to other patrons that they anticipate will generate income for them at a faster rate than the interest they pay back to you. These days however, this overly simplified model is relatively insignificant in consumer banking. Instead, they've found they can make a lot more profit by simply charging fees for the handling of your funds, and when they want to loan money to consumers they just borrow from a central bank. What this means is that the size of your balance (unless abnormally huge) is of little interest to a branch manager - it doesn't generate revenue for them much faster than a tiny balance with the same number of transactions would. To put it simply, they can live without you, and your threatening to leave, even if you follow through, is barely going to do anything to their bottom line. They will let you. If you DO have an abnormally huge balance, and it's all in a simple checking or savings account, then it might make them pause for thought. But if that's true then frankly you're doing banking wrong and should move those funds somewhere where they can work harder for you in terms of growth. They might even suggest so themselves and direct you to one of their own ""personal wealth managers""." "If it makes you feel any better, I now bank with a credit union. These WF assholes called me one day to tell me that someone had tried to withdraw $500 from my account and that I needed to sign up for a more secure account, of course with a $16 monthly charge. So I did what anybody would do... went to the bank and ask questions right? After I got there and mention the problem they told me that nothing was wrong with my account, that no transactions were attempted and even if they did attempt them and were canceled they would still show up but they didn't. Few minutes later I got another call from that guy and he was telling me that the problem was taken care of and that I didn't need to go to the bank. After that I was just suspicious. Basically what it came down to was that somebody was trying to set me up for accounts that I didn't ask for just so he can get promoted at my expense. They gave me a opportunity to report him but I didn't because I knew him personally, he was one of my ""friends"" and at the time he had two kids. I didn't want him to lose his job. I told him that what he did was completely fucked up and that you don't do that to people outside of WF. That same day I withdrew all my money. I still remember cutting the conversation short after WF tried to convince me all kinds of ways not to do that. I been with a Credit Union about 3 years now and so far so good."