A couple months ago I applied for the Alaska Business Visa card issued by Bank of America, along with a couple other cards (SEE: May 2017 credit card signup results). Overall, the results weren’t too hot. It ultimately took a 15 minute grilling by a BofA phone rep, but I was eventually approved for the Alaska Business Visa card.
Trouble in the first payment cycle
Once I received the card, I was able to hit the $1,000 minimum spend pretty quickly. My charges totaled $1,230 and change. When my first payment cycle ended and I got my statement, I quickly scheduled two payments. Done and done. Now I could just sit back and wait for the 30,000 bonus miles to post.
I was therefore quite puzzled (and aggravated) when I logged into the Bank of America website a few days after my payment due date to find that my payments NOT posted to the card. This also meant I was hit with both a late fee and interest. What the heck happened?!
It took me a minute to realize that I somehow had a -$1,230 balance on my *personal* Alaska card. Turns out that I had somehow paid that card instead. Could I have unintentionally scheduled the payments for the wrong card? Was I really that much of a doofus?
BofA, please fix your website
After poking around for a few minutes, I decided to try to schedule another payment to rectify the situation. I clicked the “Make Payment” button from the account summary of my Alaska Business Visa. This time I noticed that when I was taken to the payment screen, the last 4 digits displayed were for my *personal* Alaska card!
I had not noticed this previously, but this must have been EXACTLY what happened before to cause me to pay the wrong card. I’d think this sort of bug would be high on Bank of America’s list to fix. At least I know it was because of a crappy website and not me. Dan has had issues with Bank of America’s website previously as well (SEE: How opening a new BoA checking account TOTALLY screwed me!).
After even taking a screen video showing exactly where the error was (in case I needed proof for BofA), it was time for a phone call.
Hang on, we’ll “fix” this
The Bank of America phone representative was super understanding when I explained the situation to her. She said she could adjust the payments and backdate them, and that the interest and late fees would be removed. All in all, it was maybe a 10-minute phone call. I hung up thinking everything was A-OK.
To my surprise (again), the issue wasn’t fixed. Logging in a few days later, instead of finding both accounts zeroed out, I found even more issues.
First, the interest and late fee charges were still applied. But these were now the only charges on the account. Partial fix here, but it still needs to be fully rectified.
Secondly (and this was weird), instead of having a zero balance on my personal card, I now have a negative $2,465 balance on my personal Alaska Visa!! The rep had essentially applied a credit in the amount of my charges to *both* my personal and business accounts. Which totally doesn’t make sense.
Free money?
Essentially, I am now about $1,230 ahead (given the $2,450+ negative balance when I made only half of that in charges). Sure, I could probably walk away with the money, and Bank of America would probably never catch it. But that’s not the right thing to do. I really don’t want to make another phone call to them, as I generally hate calling the bank, but it looks like I’ll have to do so. The last time I had this much trouble with a bank, I ended up calling in the CFPB (SEE: Pulling Out The Big Guns: How I Had To Call In The CFPB On Discover). This situation doesn’t warrant that, though.
All in all, this has been super frustrating. Bank of America compounded their initial website error with a botched account adjustment. Hopefully the third time is the charm and I’ll have everything back to zero in a few days.
What about you? Have you ever had account issues this frustrating?
Featured image courtesy of Mike Mozart under CC 2.0 license.
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Bank of America is notorious for this. I have had one payment that was reported late to the credit bureaus and it was because of this exact same thing. It defaults to the first card in the row when you go to make a payment and if you do not take note of the default card, this will happen. A big, big pain indeed and I certainly share it with you!
Ouch! I’ve not had one reported late yet. Missed a couple over the years, but I have always been able to pay the balance before it impacts my credit. Not relishing calling BofA tomorrow to fix this mess.
Charlie were you able to clear up the late payment? How’d you do it? I have a problem with Citi but can’t get it cleared up
They took the fees away when I told them out their system is so backwards compared to others (I had literally pushed to pay that card and it put it on another card!) but they wouldn’t deal with the credit bureaus. It sat on my account for a long time!
The BofA interface is beyond horrible. Bill Pay is the most clunky, confusing mess I’ve ever seen. I live in constant fear of screwing up my accounts because of how poorly it’s designed.
I always use my Discover Cashback Checking and bill pay from there. Because you are naming the payee account number from the Deposit account side of things, the chances of screw ups would presumably be lower (just be sure to double, triple, quadruple check that you keyed in the account number correctly). With Discover I also get $0.10 cashback for each bill pay 😉
Ditto. +1
same process here.
Don’t you mean you’re $2465 ahead? The $1230 business card balance you tried to pay off is zeroed out (corresponding to the one payment you made), and you’ve got a bonus $2465 credit on another card.
It’s only half of that. The initial $1,230 was from my payment…to the wrong (personal) Alaska account, which was then zeroed from the business account.
I’ve had huge issues with BoA auto pay. In one case, I set up auto pay when the accounts were opened and got a message that it takes one billing cycle to take affect so I made the 1st month payment at least 10 days prior to when the bill was due. Of course then autopay deducted the entire statement amount at bill due date even though I owed nothing at that point. PIA to clear up over the phone with customer service.
This is exactly the reason I would be very hesitant to ever apply for another B of A account of any kind. I have several accounts, and have worked with them for decades, and they periodically will have these sort of clusters. Checking accounts have disappeared, “billpay” will delete all my scheduled payments, have “phantom” accounts.
The CSRs at B of A could not be any nicer, but I believe their IT problems are beyond their reach.
The randomness makes it even more frightening.
Of all the banks, BoA had the worst website, worse method of log in, no chat function, no message center. You must call them. What a pain?
Here’s another awful thing about the B of A credit card system. Seems that if you make an interim payment on your credit card, their system doesn’t recognize it until after the closing date for that card. For example, if you have autopay and your bill is $1000 and you make a payment of $500 in mid-cycle, they will take the full $1000 from your account on the payment date, leaving you with an unwanted $500 credit balance. Oh, I’ve tried and tried to have them “fix” this, to no avail.