Consumer complaint received 2020-06-25
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY
State: CA
Product: Checking or savings account
Sub-product: Other banking product or service
Issue: Managing an account
Sub-issue: Deposits and withdrawals

Complaint:
Wells Fargo Complaint My brother and I have a XXXX XXXX   Checking Account with Wells Fargo. The company is a XXXX XXXX and it is only him and I that work for it. Just the two of us, nobody else has ever worked for it except my father but he passed away before we switched to Wells Fargo. Weve been with them for a little over a year. On the morning of XX/XX/2020 I saw on our bank account that we had two separate transactions named XXXX XXXX. These two transactions is money that was taken out of our account. They are not deposits into our account. A few days later the name of the transactions were changed to Bank Card Deposit thats why I wanted to clear that up since the name sounds as if money was deposited into our account but that isnt the case. Anyway, the posting date of those two transactions was the next day, which was XX/XX/2020. One transaction was for {$4900.00} and the other was for {$9900.00} which totals to {$14000.00} that was taken from our account. We filed the fraud complaint that same Monday morning and we were simply told someone would contact us. 

I want to explain exactly how this happened. So the way my brother and I charge customers is through their credit card. Its very simple. Wells Fargo has us setup with their 3rd party merchant service gateway named XXXX. We have our bank account linked to our account on XXXX. Wells Fargo got us set up with the account on their the next day after opening our business account with the bank. Anyway, its very easy to use XXXX. We personally deliver the goods to our customers, we then create invoices on our XXXX desktop, send the invoice to the customer, and they then give us authorization to charge their credit card. We then go on XXXX and create an invoice on there, we reference the XXXX invoice that we sent the customer and simply put the amount total. Simple and easy. We get the money deposited into our account sometimes the next day or the day after. This next part is how the fraud happened. Somehow someone got into our XXXX account. How they did that? I have no clue. We always get a notification to our business email whenever someone logs into our XXXX account. We never got the email notification that someone else logged in. So the way this fraud happened is very mind boggling to me because of how stupid it is. We are able to charge our customers credit card, thats of course how we get paid. On XXXX, there is a refund option for each invoice. You can refund the money back to the customers credit card or you can refund the money back to a different card. Why that is an option is beyond my understanding. The person who hacked us just simply refunded money back onto their card. They tried to do this on three separate transactions, two of which were the successful ones I mentioned. The third one that wasnt successful didnt go through because we didnt have enough money in our account. The unsuccessful one was almost very close to {$5000.00}. So thats how it happened. 

Fast forward a few days later to Friday XX/XX/XXXXwhen we finally got a call from Wells Fargo Merchant Services saying that our account had been compromised. The person who called us was the Merchant Services agent who was assigned to our fraud case. I kid you not, there is no better way to say this than how Im going to say it right now. He basically told us we will not be getting our money back because they determined it was a security breach on our end. That is it! He told us nothing else. The call was maybe a couple minutes long and that was it. The following week we went into a branch to escalate a complaint. This is something Wells Fargo has where they supposedly do more investigation into the case. We did that Monday XX/XX/2020. A couple days later we called the Merchant Services agent assigned to our case and told him we escalated a complaint and what are the next steps we can do because this is our money that was stolen from us and we need to get this money back because its crippling our business. He told us that the complaint wont do anything because whoever is looking further into the investigation will only call him for reference and he will tell them what the merchant services department determined, which is that it was our fault basically. The first time we spoke to this agent was Friday XX/XX/2020. He told us a manager from Wells Fargo Merchant Services would give us a call next week, which was the week of XX/XX/XXXXand we have yet to receive a call. The second time we called this agent dude assigned to our case we also asked him what we can do to prevent this from happening again. We had to ask for how to keep our account safe for him to tell us what we can do. First thing he said was to change your password as often as every month. The second thing he told us was to call XXXX customer service and make a change to our account so that refunds on any transactions can not be made. Of course we did this right away. 

So thats how Wells Fargo is handling our case. My brother and I have been doing all the calling ourselves. Weve only been called by them once.

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