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The Almighty Buck

Some Wells Fargo Customers Say Their Deposits Aren't Showing Up in Their Accounts (nbcnews.com) 87

Posted by EditorDavid from the deposit-slipping dept.
"For the second time this year, Wells Fargo acknowledged that deposits were not showing up in customers' accounts," reports NBC News: In an emailed statement Friday morning, a Wells Fargo representative said the issue was affecting a "limited number of customers," and that "the vast majority" of instances had been resolved before noon, while the "few remaining" would be resolved soon. This week's incident mirrored one encountered by Wells Fargo customers in March, which the company then blamed on an unspecified "technical issue...."

Customers nationwide appeared to be affected by this week's outage. Jeani Cortez, a single, disabled, self-employed accountant and Alaska resident, says she was supposed to have paid her rent, gas, electric and internet payments for the month by now with funds she deposited Wednesday. She said she was told Friday by a Wells Fargo representative that she would not be able to access her deposit for another three to five business days. She'd earlier been told that Wells Fargo could send her a letter to give to her creditors; that too has not arrived.
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Some Wells Fargo Customers Say Their Deposits Aren't Showing Up in Their Accounts More

Some Wells Fargo Customers Say Their Deposits Aren't Showing Up in Their Accounts

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  • Did somebody drop a floppy disk or what? (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @09:42PM (#63743438)

    I mean, legacy systems up to extreme legacy can be found in many banks, but they are supposed to be reliable. And if this was a transfer job (batch processing is also all over banking core IT), you are supposed to have a way to reliably run it again without causing duplicates. Well, I guess somebody went cheap on the IT "experts" at Wells Fargo.

    • ... but it was aliens.

    • I mean, legacy systems up to extreme legacy can be found in many banks, but they are supposed to be reliable. ... Well, I guess somebody went cheap on the IT "experts" at Wells Fargo.

      I know the adage is to not attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but in this case, I bet more heavily on these delays being done on purpose for some benefit to Wells Fargo. Just my $0.02 based on their history of dicking over their customers.

      • So failing to perform their most basic function as a bank is to their benefit?

        Can you explain what possible benefit they'd get in any universe from fucking up countless deposits?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by thomn8r ( 635504 )

          Can you explain what possible benefit they'd get in any universe from fucking up countless deposits?

          Wells Fargo has access to the cash, but the customer doesn't. This is not a new gambit - back in the day banks made millions by delaying check processing.

          • So fucking up a few thousand or whatever deposits twice a year and having people change banks and the government eventually looking at them is worth the million or two they'll make in interest (at most) for the few days' delay?

            Reputation is everything in business. They spend far more on advertising than they'd make on interest.

            This is a bank. The only IT people dumber than bank IT are law firm IT. Even most government IT is better.

            I'd bet my soul this was pure IT fuckup not some conspiracy to scrape a fe

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Can you explain what possible benefit they'd get in any universe from fucking up countless deposits?

          Fees. Lots and lots of fees.

          We already know banks have managed to re-order deposits and withdrawals to ensure they extract the maximum amount of fees that they can.

          I mean, if they can make you go into the red (overdraft) even briefly, they can benefit from both fees on entering overdraft, fees on being overdrawn, and most wicked of all, NSF (non sufficient funds) fees because you ended up overdrawn and some t

      • I don't agree. Incompetence here is possibly just lack of skilled workers, in the needed positions, and an unhealthy dose of poor oversight.

        And WF is well-known for lack of proper internal oversight. Incompetence in this leads to unfortunate consequences. In the past, malfeasance and criminal (well, illegal so there) practices. Now, failed management may have led to basic operational breakdowns.

        And the very limited impacts speak to me that something subtle broke. The scope doesn't excuse them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      The real question is who is actually at fault and how will the finger point work out. Second question what the actual balances of those accounts, status of deposits vs what the online banking enviornment shows. Is this something Wells did or is this some thing Hogan screwed up (www.luxoft.com).

      One of the dirty little secrets of the megabank world is they don't really maintain their own system of record. They do the business accounting, and their front ends have account records so they can do things quickly

  • I must have put a decimal point in the wrong plac (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @09:43PM (#63743440)

    I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

  • that there are still people banking with Wells Fargo?

    Well, sure, probably safer than crypto. Probably.

  • Is Wells Fargo even part of FedNow?

  • I still try to keep paper receipts and paper statements. Yes, they cause huge waste, especially thanks to banks printing a small brochure worth of stuff every time.

    But it also means I would have a paper trail if something really goes bad. Yes, it could be one in a million, but not having access to your money even for a week could be devastating.

    (That is also why I use two banks, and don't hold money in services like PayPal, but immediately withdraw anything that comes from anyone).

    Better be safe than sorry.

    • Re:Call me paranoid, but this is why... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @10:15PM (#63743484) Homepage

      There is a digital way to accomplish what you are doing with paper.

      My approach is to download PDF copies of my statements each month and save them to my hard drive, which is in turn backed up to OneDrive. If something happens with the bank software, I still have a "paper" trail. I can go back and print these PDFs any time I want, if I need to document something. And I don't have to keep actual stacks of paper.

      • The pdf you downloaded can be hacked to change what it says. Paper is much better proof in a court of law. Furthermore, I regularly get locked out of some account due to TFA nonsense, and fixing it is a giant pain, taking usually 45 minutes on the phone when all is said and done. Sometimes, the pdf isn't there at all, because the bank fucked up. Other times, the bank's website is doing "scheduled maintenance" on a Saturday afternoon.

        It actually takes me less time to get a paper statement and scan and oc

        • It sounds like your bank has problems, I'd keep physical paper with them too! Actually, I'd switch banks. That's ridiculous.

          On my banks' website, it takes me all of 15 seconds to log in (including MFA), get to the statement, and download it. It's always there when it's supposed to be, on all four bank sites I use. Your story of website issues is not the norm, in my experience.

  • Why (Score:2)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 )

    This is especially embarrassing for Wells Fargo, as they are enrolled in the new FedNow [frbservices.org] instant payment system. This should eliminate the need for sitting on people's deposits and transfers for days, as long as both payee and payor's financial institutions are participants.

    • FedNow is fine, but this isn't an issue with the money not being able to move quickly. This is a software bug. Software bugs can happen with FedNow just as easily as with any other legacy mechanism. The risk is probably actually higher with FedNow, because it's so new.

      • So beta testing is passé, eh?

        • More that it's hard to have even beta testing catch every edge scenario.

          When you're looking at hundreds of millions of transactions per day, when you go to beta testing it's very hard to adequately test for every edge condition because you might just not be aware that that edge condition exists.

          For example, way back in the day my dad's SSN caused problems in some state systems because the designers, presumably midwestern types, never considered that a SSN could start with a zero. I mean, that should be a s

          • With all that being true, FedNow was not mentioned in either the summary nor the story, it has nothing to do with the disappearing deposits.

      • It's far from clear that it's a bug in software. It is more likely a bug in some policy. I had a situation recently with Fidelity where they wouldn't give me like $75 out of a much larger bond that I sold. It required a major papal dispensation to get my $75.

        It's complicated, but the gist is they had a policy where they held back certain amounts for cash transactions made by people who have margin privilege, in case there is a margin call. But I didn't actually have anything that had been bought on marg

        • The Wells Fargo issue has nothing to do with unusual policies for less-common scenarios. These are direct deposits, which are very widespread and not subject to limits in what you can withdraw immediately. According to the story, the deposits are disappearing entirely from people's accounts, as in, no record of the deposit exists. This is certainly not due to some unexpected business rule. Deposits don't disappear unless there is a bug either in the software, or the software process (such as some IT person

    • In Thailand "wire" transfers between private bank customers are instant.
      The common way, is to have an mobile app, scan the QR code of your partner, which can be a mom&pop shop, or just a private person showing his code on his phone, type the amount and off you go.
      If you pay in a bigger shop, the amount is encoded in the QR code at the cashier.
      Money is at the other side instantly.

      Same for online banking. While the interface is more traditional, the mobile of my GF is pinging with money received, before m

      • Why would I want instant direct cash payments as a buyer instead of credit cards?

        If something goes wrong or the sellers fucks me in a direct pay situation, I'm hosed.

        With a credit card I can file a complaint with the bank and they deal with it. I've had to file 3 times in my life and got my money back each time within a few weeks. Total recovered about $7000 usd. Try that with instant direct cash payments. The biggest one was about 5k for a mini remodel in the kitchen where they turned out to be fly by

  • ...was when they torched a Wells Fargo. Fuck Wells Fargo.

  • Is this perhaps a glitch with FedNow adoption?

  • Close your accounts (Score:3)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @03:04AM (#63743744)

    If you are a Wells Fargo customer and are annoyed at crap like this, close your accounts and take your banking elsewhere.

  • Ever notice (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @03:14AM (#63743754) Homepage Journal

    Ever notice how these massive bank screwups always somehow favor the bank? Either they somehow have beaten all odds by orders of magnitude, or somehow when the error is in the customer's favor they "somehow" "find" the resources to fix the problem instantly.

    • They own the legislature and most executive branch agencies that supposedly regulate them. Do a little googling for how many, eg, JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs executives now hold positions in government, not just in the US but around the world.

    • Not really, because at least for me it isn't true. I see stories of individuals getting massive individual deposits regularly. I've seen the bank fat finger and deposit too much into my account from a cash deposit.

      And occasionally they mess up enough that said customer gets to keep at least some of the money.

  • Been There (Score:3)

    by CoolDiscoRex ( 5227177 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:21AM (#63743930) Homepage

    From 2009 - 2010, on three superate occasions, I made CASH deposits at a teller that did not show up in my WF account. Had I not kept my receipts, I would have lost the money. When I went to the branch with my receipts, the bank employee never seemed surprised, and always said the exact same thing:

    Federal Law gives us 10 days to investigate before we have to make the money available to you. It all seemed very routine to him.

    In each case, Wells Fargo took all of those ten days, even though a reconciliation of the cash drawers at the end of the day should have been sufficient. How considerate of Congress to give them all of that time to keep our money, even when they do it repeatedly. All they have to says is ooops, and your money is theirs for ten more days. I closed my WF account in 2010.

    I am not a banking expert, but I came away convinced that this was deliberate on the part of Wells Fargo. Certainly X percent of people lose their receipts, and this would be easy money for Wells Fargo. I do not know if this was the ruse they were pulling, but to see that it is still occurring is telling. Believe me, this is not a new thing, and if it is truly an honest mistake, it is not one they have tried very hard to fix over the last decade.

  • Here's what happens. This is batch processing. The basic systems were built in the 70's, and usually Cobol running on mainframes. As technology and banking has changed, they have added layers and layers of translators, adapters, etc., around the original core systems. The documentation of these systems is on typewritten papers, and the old Greybeards who wrote and understood that code have long since been laid off in the age purges.

    So, when something goes sideways, they hire CS contractors from whatever com

    • Wait, so you're saying if I apply the turtle graphics coding I learned in grade school summer camp I can fix bank code? Sweet. Time to come out of retirement for the easy big bucks!

  • What do Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Westamerica Bank, and Bank of the West have in common? Answer, I have banked with all of them and had all of them willfully and deliberately delay deposits, while falling over themselves to process withdrawals, creating overdrafts which I was then charged for.

    When overdraft fees (and "protection" — yes, exactly like a mob) were created at least they would cover your overdrafts for a fee. Now they charge you a fee for denying them, which costs them nothing. So it w

  • ...to do. Seriously, can't they just be nationalised or made into a worker-owned cooperative & turned into a competitor for the other big banks to bring them into line? I bet you US banking services would improve dramatically & be more affordable soon after.

    • ... and according to Milton Friedman, that one job is to maximize returns for their shareholders.

      Your idea is not new and is not necessarily bad. In fact, it's been tried [wikipedia.org]: "The United States Postal Savings System was a postal savings system signed into law by President William Howard Taft and operated by the United States Post Office Department, predecessor of the United States Postal Service, from January 1, 1911, until July 1, 1967." However, "the Postal Savings System was seen as redundant. A campaign b

  • I opened my account with them when I was 18, it only took a young and stupid me about 2 months before I said fuck this and moved to someone else ( that someone else being BofA...young and stupid remember ).

    Why would you keep giving money to an institution with such a horrible record of service?

  • I'll keep my cash stuffed under the mattress before I EVER bank with Wells Fargo.

    • I get avoiding Wells Fargo, but don't do any mattress stuffing. This may seem counter intuitive, but money in itself is not a good store of value because inflation erodes its value. And in the US, bank savings accounts may as well be mattress stuffing! People are counting on their money being "safe" in the bank [mattress], while the bank offers low rates of returns.

      • Then consider how often the mattress gets thrown in the dump or whatever, lost in a fire, WITHOUT removing the money first.

        There's not any difference between most savings accounts and checking accounts these days, return wise, and I'd only recommend using such an account for your immediate monetary needs, keeping the rest of the money in investments.

  • At this point is beyond my thinking. They have already demonstrated that they don't care about their customers and swindled them, and now this

  • Why do they still have customers?

    IMHO they deserve what they get if they stayed.

    • Because it's a pita to change banks, especially if you have a local branch you use. Also, there are some services that are only offered by the big banks, and if you need those, all the big banks suck.

  • I gave up on using Wells years and years ago after they screwed up for the Nth time, where N~=5. Unfortunately, when all the banks went bust in 2008-2009, Wells bought one of my banks, so I had to quit Wells *again*, like a bad ex-girlfriend that just won't go away.

    • Same here. I was with Wells in the eighties because it was convenient, had a heck of a time with them, and switched to a different bank when I moved out of state following a job. Then, Wells moved to my new state and bought that bank. It was almost like they were chasing me. So I switched to a credit union, where I have been for the last 20 years or so.

  • What software are they running? Do the banks all use one or a few banking software systems? Do they roll their own from scratch? Or is it something in between, e.g. a database system that each bank configures?

  • I can't speak for Wells Fargo now, as I haven't done business with them for decades, but back in the 1980s, when I was just starting out in my first well paying job but had accumulated debt in college and was living paycheck to paycheck, I observed that it would be a week or more before my funds were available after a paycheck was deposited. Which at that time in my life, was a big deal. So I went to auto deposit thinking that would solve the problem, and nothing changed. I would get the auto deposit rec

  • Making higher interest rate loans for minorities, creating fake accounts for their existing customers to inflate numbers, enabling transactions for the Nigerian Prince scams for years, fake interviews for minorities they never intend to hire, fines against the Wells Fargo in the billions....

    Who ignores all this publicly available news and uses this bank?

    Run away, far away from Wells Fargo....

  • As the various scandals involving actual fraud, etc have shown to the general public... behind the scenes, Wells is an absolute shit-show.

  • ... are a fucking joke.

    FTA: [...] had deposited a check into her Wells Fargo account [...]

    A what? A check? What is this, the fucking 1980s?

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