OK, first off, I don't claim to have the moral high ground in this situation, but I do need some advice. My wife had an outstanding balance with BoA for $900. $700 of it being nothing more than overdraft fees from a situation that got started with a delayed deposit, etc of 6 years ago. She has gone back and forth with them for 6 years but they never budged. In the meantime, she just used a shared account with her mother that they are both on. Today, BoA just withdrew the disputed $900 from the joint account without permission from both account holders. They essentially told my wife they can take that money from any account on which her name appears, even if it is a joint account with someone else. Any recourse here? That was our mortgage payment...
Does BoA have a judgement against your wife? If they got a judgement (even if she never showed for the court case) they legally can take actions to seize your funds. Having your wife's name on the joint account makes it "her" money.
No, there was no judgement. They justified it by saying they are entitled to recover the money anyway they see fit if they can find assets in any of their other accounts. The problem is, it's a joint account and not all the assets are hers. We've tried, for years, to discuss this with them and at one point even responded to a settlement offer but never heard back from them. No one at the bank will discuss the matter and they always redirect us to Dallas or New York where we get no help. It's not like we are trying to rip them off, it's just they've refused to talk with us at all, even when we respond to their collection efforts.
What state do you live in? Some states do not allow seizing of bank assets. Check out the state's AG's website. BUT: have you read the fine print on your account disclosure? Have you requested a written copy of that from the bank where it would state that they can do that? They need to be able to generate that for you, otherwise they don't have a case. Send a letter to them, certifed with return receipt, to whoever is in New York, give them 15 days to generate the original contract that would have governed that procedure, or there is no debt. In the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) Rule 1002 this is a requirement, so at least consult an attorney about that.... I have the feeling they now they are on shaky legal ground, since they are hesitant to correspond with you. So get it all in writing, and force them to resolve this. I had a similar situation with my bank, and they did send the documentation. However, it was stuff I had never seen before and that sure as heck did not have my signature on it back when I signed up for the acct years ago. Banks seem to have a way of changing rules without telling anybody...I didn't fight it, because it was not that much, and I was in the wrong. It just surprises me that you are still with that bank!!! If this has been going on for years, by all means switch to somebody else. I also had a case with BoA years ago, where they could not generate the documentation on a loan that was granted to my mother-in-law in 1991. It was a lien towards the house we assumed from her, and I just wanted to take over this lien and keep paying it off. BoA claimed it was unassumable, and we had to pay the whole thing off immediately. In the original contract that I had from 1991 it did not say that, nor could they show me where else in the original loan docs it said that. THEY WENT SO FAR AS TO SAY THAT THE LOAN OFFICER FROM BACK THEN HAD DIED AND HE WAS THE ONLY ONE THAT KNEW WHERE THE DOCS WERE.... unbelievable! BUT I told them this loan officer had been a friend of the family for years, and yes, he was alive and well and working somewhere else now... So, by all means, either challenge them to produce paperwork, or forget it, take all of your family's accounts = assets for the bank = somewhere else.. I threatened to do that with a yet different bank a few years back, between the family accounts and business accounts we had over 1.5 mill in assets. They gave me the runaround over $150 of checks they miscoded, and wouldn't budge because it was over 30 days when I noticed it. So we pulled all accounts, and that was the end of that. I lost 150 bucks, but they lost 1.5 mill. So, the last recourse would be to add up all your accounts that your family holds, show them in your letter how much they stand to loose over a few hundred dollars, and threaten to go somewhere else if you don't get it back within 10 days, and go from there.
There's no question about it, yes they can pull whatever money you have in their bank to pay off debts owed to them. If it is a BoA account she is negative on they can offset whatever they want. I work for internal collections for a credit union and I do it daily. NOW if this debt is with BoA and they pulled it from let's say your FirstBank of Maine account for example then that would be different. Internal-Yes, they can take what they want it's called right of offset External-No, not too clear about that but I have never seen us withdraw money from a 3rd party account, especially $900
