Consumer complaint received 2022-11-07
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
State: FL
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service
Sub-product: Domestic (US) money transfer
Issue: Fraud or scam

Complaint:
On XX/XX/2022 I noticed that there was a pending debit of {$150000.00} on my business checking account at the Bank of America. I immediately called the bank and advised them that this debit was not initiated by me and was obviously fraudulent. After spending a long time on the phone with the bank I was told that the account would be frozen and that money could only be deposited into it and money could not be withdrawn from the account. The next morning I called and spoke to an agent by the name of XXXX who advised that they had managed to block the fraudulent transfer and that the money would be credited back to the account within 24 - 48 hours. The next day the money was in fact credited back to the account, and I thought that this was over. Shortly thereafter I noticed that the bank had " force debited '' the amount out of the account. I immediately called to find out why the bank had " force debited '' the amount out of the account that was frozen. 

Almost 6 weeks have gone by since that time and me or my staff have spent the best part of 60-70 hours on the phone trying to find out the status of my claim and when I will be getting the money back. During some phone calls we get transferred to 5 different agents during one call as they say they are unable to help us, the last agent said that the matter was with the analysts. On inquiring what does that mean and when will matter be resolved we were told that is all the information that they are able to give us at that time. 

This matter has been dragging on for almost 6 weeks with nothing from the bank in writing as to what the process is and where we are in the process. We are constantly told that the matter is being escalated to senior management but 95 percent of the time we receive no information from them at all unless we phone and even then they are not forthcoming with any information.

We are of the opnion that the bank is not acting in our best interests and had ample time to block the transfer which they said they had, only to reverse course without giving us any explanation. When we inquired this morning on the phone we were told that the bank was waiting for a response from the other bank, this is after 5-1/2 weeks have transpired and they had all the information of where the money was purported to have been sent to including the routing and account numbers and they say could not get any information in all this time. This does not sound feasible to me. 

During the numerous phone calls we were told in the beginning that this could take up to 45 days to be resolved. More recently we were told that this could take between 45 and 90 days and this morning the agent we spoke to said between 60 and 120 days. 
What is so troubling about this matter is that all the information we get differs from agent to agent and there is no consistent answer that we can rely on. We have written a number of emails to various business bankers from the bank that we were put in touch with asking for certain questions to be answered in writing but when they respond they advise they are doing their best to escalate this matter but do not respond to the questions posed to them. So it appears that the bank will not committ to anything in writing which I find particularly troubling. 

This is a very large sum of money and represents a good portion of our working capital and if this money is not returned to us soon this could be extremely detrimental to our business and could in fact put us out of business. The Bank of America with who we have been banking for more than 10 years is absolutely unsympathetic to this fact and purposely seems to be dragging their feet.

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