BEWARE of Wells fargo Bank

wanda5

Full Member
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Location
lala land
HI Everyone! Its been a long time! Hope all my buddies are WINNING BIG!!

Well, of course the first place I came was to the "complaint department" lol...but actually its not a complaint about a casino, but about the bank weve been with for 13 years and I hope noone has to go through the hell I went through.
KEEP your eyes open when you're using your bank account and write EVERYTHING you spend in a casino down along with the transaction numbers!! Seems like a pain in the butt...BUT let me tell ya what happened to me...
We, my husband and I played at 5 or 6 different casinos using an account I opened for casino play ONLY. We also have 2 other accounts plus our savings accounts with Wells Fargo. Well, I had won $9000 and it was cashed back to that bank account and was my PLAY money. I transferred $5000 to my savings account and left $4000. Since most of my wins were from small deposits, I started only playing $25 each time and my husband would play different amounts as well. We are only allowed to withdraw $500 per day so the only way we really knew if either of us were playing a lot was by getting rejected when we hit $500. Also we could look at our online bank statement because the money was taken out within seconds. ....Turned out they stopped rejecting us alltogether and thats not the half of it!

For instance one day my husband played $500 and I played $300 that night, not even knowing he played (i found this out way later). After 3 or 4 weeks of playing A LOT I knew my account was getting low but I checked it and it still said I had $1100 in it. That seemed really high to me but I looked at my statement and it looked fine.
I then noticed that on a few days they show exactly $500 worth of charges being taken out on day each, which was weird to me because when I made a casino deposit, the money was deducted out of my account within seconds (but said "pending") but 3 days later they finally cleared a bunch of stuff at once (I assumed due to maybe a weekend or something.)

What was happening was the casino sent the withdraw to my bank immeadiatly, and on my online statement it showed that it took out the amount from my balance (but still showed as "pending" even though the funds were shown to be taken out of the balance) SO I thought I was safe, check my statement and thats it...

Well, WRONG, my bank showed the debit like I said, but a day or even days later would REJECT it NEVER TELLING ME, forcing the casino to have to try to withdraw the funds at a later date. I LATER (after the disaster and research)noticed that they rejected anything over $500 in a day...yet they still let me charge more than that, approving it even to the casino BUT LATER rejecting it??!! So although my account looks like it has money in it, its only because the charges were NOT actually CHARGED, although I thought they were because I SAW the charge directly after I made the debit! I checked it a lot too because a few casinos would charge fees, but would refund them when I gave them copies of my charges.
Well, my bank had thrown back SO many charges, and I just kept thinking I have all this money in my account, so we keep playing. Well, I had a cashout of $1400 from Golden Tiger who emailed me to tell me that they now have a 48 hour turnaround, it may have even been 24. I had few small cashouts too so I was assuming when my account showed more money than I thought it was because I was getting my cashouts and my hubby had a few too but like I said, I didnt pay much attention except to make sure I was not charged with fees or check to see if I was low.
About 3 days after seeing online that I had a little over $500 left in my account, I played and had fun and the next day, I got rejected. I thought maybe I had reached my $500 limit or my husband played. No big deal, I didnt have to transfer funds because I knew Golden Tiger had sent me another email saying my account was credited two days prior to that. Well low and behold I check my account and I am bouncing things left and right! I cant understand where the hell all these charges were coming from! Its soo hard to figure out when you play at many casinos because each casino uses like 3 different charge names. It was SUCH A MESS! Those bastards had Golden Tigers money on the 11th of January but put every charge they could put through (that i had already thought had gone through) ALL at once on the 12th and 13th PLUS "48" $31 charges for NSF!!! So what happened was they charged 16 NSF charges on the 12th, 16 more on the 13th and 16 more on the 14th along with allowing ALL the kicked back casino charges to go through AND on the 14th FINALLY showed the credit from Golden Tiger!!! later telling me that they were allowed to hold that credit for 3 full days!! So about $1488 in just NSF charges...16 of them charged 3 times. SInce they also paid the casinos on the 12th and 13th, by the time Golden Tigers money got there, IT WAS GONE ...to NSF charges. When I researched the charges which literally took days, I found charges from as far back as 34 days that were saved and put through only AFTER I was was negitive in my account. The ONLY way I saw it was because my playcheck would show the exact dates that money was spent. Yes, we went crazy gambling, but only because we have the money to do so, plus it was from a cashin so it was like free money anyway. (I had also broken my leg so I was bored out of my mind so it made gambling even more attractive to me)

You would think with the amount of money in our other accounts, especially the savings accounts, PLUS 13 years of GOOD banking credit with them they would have just transfered the funds....but NOOOO. INSTEAD, they were complete jerks and spoke to me on the phone like I was TRASH and would not even BUDGE on the charges. Now, I was freaking out because I thought I really screwed up somehow and I SO didnt want my husband to know lol So I tried to handle it myself...but it was a joke and I have NEVER been treated so disrespectfully by anyone like that before! Finally my husband dealt with it and even though we paid the charges, we are now like blacklisted from opening new accounts elsewhere. Which I tried to do, but my husband still banks with those jerks and says we should have written the crap down...yes, we should have, but when you know you can see your online statement at any given moment, IT SHOULD BE ACCURATE!! So I am an idiot basically, I know, and it WAS a learning experience, but I hope none of you ever have to go through anything like that. Its not easy fessing up that I was too lazy to write stuff down, but if it helps any of you, its worth it, plus its kind of relieving to rag on Wells Fargo! lol I stopped playing for about 8 months, now I ONLY use PREPAID cards (not like I have a choice lol)
Honestly, I will be the first to say I screwed up, but damn, theres IS something wrong with what they did as well. AND I cannot believe they can get away with that...seems like a SCAM...what i still dont get is why the casinos never mentioned not getting paid until sooo late.
So watch your banks...make sure that anything pending shows that it actually cleared, even if they take the money out from your balance..its not cleared until it SHOWS cleared. Also, I bet a lot of people have HAD to have dealt with charges that showed up out of no where, weeks or even a month later and then realized it was from a casino, but thought it had already been paid. With all the complaints about the casinos I bet a few of them are due to this because you really feel robbed, but its not the casinos fault obviously. My first instinct was that a casino was just falsley charging me. I have only been burned once (which Bry helped me fix WAY back when : ) And it turned out to be the payment company and not the casino itself...So I have nothing but GREAT respect for the casinos...they have been GREAT to me so I want to make that very clear.

Thats my shpeal...and its good to be BACK! I look forward to writing more pleasent posts later, but I had to get that out : ) I cant be the only person thats happened to, and even though I hope none of you have been through it, if you have, I would love to hear about...its been MONTHS and I am still pissed...its not the even the money, but the principal.

HUGS,
Wanda
PS, no time for spell check....so sorry if its a mess!
 
I'll give anyone who reads that whole thing an invitation for a free amazon giftcertificate :p .

Sorry to hear about your problem.
-Brackis
 
Don't use a real bank account, instead use one of the Webwallets like NETeller, Firepay, Click2pay etc! I use NETeller, once you've made the deposit the money will be deducted from the NETeller balance almost instantaneously so you don't have to worry about phantom money still showing up as part of the balance.
 
Some general comments:

*Your credit card transactions aren't really handled by your bank. Your bank contracts it out to some other planet, and it goes through some other unknown parties before it gets to the casino. So it's very easy for things to be approved and unapproved...

*Never rely on your online bank statement to show you transactions in real time. There's typically a a day or two lag period.

*American banks treat online gamblers like trash, it's not just you. It's because they know that you really spent thousands of dollar on porn.
 
Wow, I never knew that. Makes it make sense now, Thanks Mary. Ya know THEY could have TOLD me that while I was freaking out ya know?? NEVER once did they even come close to explaining why and I was soooo frustrated! My husband is more like the type to just say "lets just pay it and its over" but i still wanted answers.
Anyway, thanks again for telling me, at least I now know WHY. Still it seems really strange that they picked the DAY I was neg. to push ALL the charges through at once, when they never posted more than $500 PER day ever on my account before that day. Also, if i was charging at a resteraunt or store and had reached my $500 limit I WOULD get rejected, just NOT at the casinos...well not much I can do now and prepaid is working great so I need to let it go lol...grrr lololol

mary said:
Some general comments:

*Your credit card transactions aren't really handled by your bank. Your bank contracts it out to some other planet, and it goes through some other unknown parties before it gets to the casino. So it's very easy for things to be approved and unapproved...

*Never rely on your online bank statement to show you transactions in real time. There's typically a a day or two lag period.

*American banks treat online gamblers like trash, it's not just you. It's because they know that you really spent thousands of dollar on porn.
 
You may have a case if there was a daily limit of $500 on the account, although I am sure that WF will have covered itself by reserving the right to reject transaction that would take you over $500 rather than guaranteeing that all such transactions will be rejected.

I think, however, that ultimately you are responsible for your bank account, and you need to work out some record keeping system with your husband so that you know how much money is in the account, maybe you should have two separate accounts, even if they are nominally in joint names.

Did you use your Visa check card to fund the casinos or something like Neteller? I am asking because WF introduced a clause into the terms and conditions some years ago which prohibits the use of the card for internet gambling, although it may depend on which state you are living in. Breaching the conditions would put you in more difficult positions.
 
One thing you may want to have a chat with the bank on, They have a legal limit on how many overdraft fees they can charge you in 1 day, I belive it is 5 overdrafts. Based on that you should be able to recover some of the funds. Of course you will have to research this yourself, they will not lift a finger to help you out. If there was no limit, say if you were to hypothetically write 100 $1 checks on one day and they all went through before the funds were there, they would charge you $3000 for $100 worth of checks. I went round and round with Wells Fargo on this exact same issue, I had a deposit not clear and then about 12 checks came through, which I not only got charged an overdraft fee on but a return check fee as well for another $28, which happened at a horrible time because it took me 2 weeks to get the funds to cover the checks. By that time the damage had already been done, I had over $1100 in overdraft fees alone, for about $300 worth of checks. When I tried to negotiate with them they wouldn't budge at all, and acted like they were teaching me some sort of lesson by making it more difficult to rectify my balance. As a result, they lost out in the end, my family pulled out hundreds of thousands of funds from the bank and switch to a different branch based on the way they treated me.

If you also notice, they do not show the before and after balance on their webpage after each transaction, they only show an available balance at the current moment which makes accounting difficult if you are not keeping close track of your books at home.

The reason they process debits in this way, is so that they can MAXIMIZE your overdraft fees. This is a huge issue with banks these days, trying to figure out how to steal more money from you based on a minor mistake. Wells Fargo above all other banks is the scum of the earth, I would never think of banking there again. If you are flawless in your accounting and you never have a deposit show up late they sure you will be fine with them.

They also lost 2 deposits that I made and it took them several days to sort it out, my Brother made a wire transfer to me from his Wells Fargo account and it mysteriously dissappeared and they had no record of it even though we filled out the paperwork and then it mysteriously re-appeared in my bank over a week later. They sure are friendly when you bring them business and set up accounts with them, but when they get ahold of someones money they are no ones friend at all.

So, I am guessing they reported it to Checksystems if they blacklisted you?? Thats the only way that can happen, if you get a negative report in Checksystems many banks use that as a background check on you, I know this because they threatened me with it. But you account would have to stay negative for 60 days or more for this to happen legally. So judging from what you have said here, you may have a legitimate case against the bank, look closely into the local banking laws and the banks policies.
 
Last edited:
mary said:
*American banks treat online gamblers like trash, it's not just you. It's because they know that you really spent thousands of dollar on porn.

Could you please elaborate on that statement? How do you mix porn and online gambling?
 
Dear Wanda, How are you doing? It's sooo nice to hear from you. We miss you....

And you are still the same Wanda I remember. I still have to hold my breath to read your thread. Gee... what a night mare you had been through.

Good luck and my best wish to you... Let me know if you ever visit CT casino and I would like to see you and your hobby.

Hugs,
bewitch
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Meister Ratings

Back
Top