Consumer complaint received 2023-12-07
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY
State: CA
Product: Checking or savings account
Sub-product: Other banking product or service
Issue: Problem with a lender or other company charging your account
Sub-issue: Transaction was not authorized

Complaint:
This is a follow up reply/claim on CFPB, case number : XXXXWells Fargo case number : XXXX. 

SR Escalations Rep on behalf of Wells Fargo, narrated the development of the claim thru Wells Fargo stating that the fraudulent activity was not caused by any error from WFMS and making us responsible for the disputed bank card interchange fees in the amount of {$4400.00}.

We insist that the above is not right by the bank, given the following : 1. A number of transactions in the order of XXXX ( XXXX XXXX ) count were attempted on our online website payment XXXX ( XXXX ) in a time span of 12 hours by what we think was a robot software. None of them were approved. 
XXXX. No party, but the bank and its card processing partners ( not even the hacker ), were benefited from the rounded XXXX transaction attempts on this fraud episode on our websited payment XXXX. 
XXXX. There was no business transaction completed such as a sale, merchandise exchange or sale refund by which a bank card was processed. 
XXXX. Our payments XXXX was blocked by WFMS after the above attack. We could not even process physical payments at our local store with our POS machine. 
XXXX. Wells Fargo Merchant Services nor its card processing partners, never oriented us, as a small business with a card processing service, on best practices for our online payments XXXX, nor has memoed nor updated us on fraudulent activity trends, nor has implemented or made us aware of any fraud prevention campaing for small businesses online in order to try to avoid this type of attacks as much as possible. 

So in conclusion we have an attack of the aforementioned characteristics that was not blocked nor prevented by WFMS and its bank card processing partners and/or its fraud prevention department, but yet our payments XXXX and payment processing service was blocked remotely by Wells Fargo and reactived when we called in to report the attack. 
Why wasn't the same criterion used to block our payments processing service at last, used when the transaction number reached anything unusual for our historic typical use of the payments processing gateway/service? Our daily transaction count tops in 50 transactions in any given 24 hour period. Just like a credit/debit card gets blocked when it is used for non-typical uses, so no further transactions can be attempted.

WFMS failed to provide this security measure, ergo Wells Fargo Merchant Services is responsible for the excess amount of transactions attempted on the payment XXXX. 

We are a local-family-owned small business that gets charged monthly fees from the bank to have this type of fraud protection and periodic orientation on new fraud trends or schemes. We are long standing customers and we have been failed by our bank.We feel defrauded. 

Please refund our account in the amount of the remaining balance for the charged interchange fees equal to {$4400.00}.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation