Consumer complaint received 2024-09-24
Product: Checking or savings account — Savings account
Issue: Managing an account — Deposits and withdrawals
Company: SANTANDER HOLDINGS USA, INC. (NY)

My mother and I, joint account holders at Santander Bank, were horrified to discover that our accounts were hacked and a massive amount of money was stolen, in a stream of fraudulent electronic withdrawals made within a 2 week period in XXXXXXXX XXXX. It was mind boggling how this all escaped the notice of the bank, raised no red flags. Especially since the brazen succession of high-figure withdrawals, many of them occurring on a single day, were completely incongruous with our long-established normal banking patterns. It took 3 lengthy calls to Santander 's customer service line, to accurately report the disputed transactions and get them documented. And after investigating, the bank ultimately credited our accounts in full, for which we are grateful. But we remain uneasy. We need to know as best we can, how our identities were compromised. What info did the thieves have, to enable them to hack into our accounts, and open up external deposit accounts to receive the fraudulent withdrawals? And how did they get that info? 

I filed a police report at my local precinct, and an Identity Theft Report with the FTC. I also used the FTCs template to send a letter of request to Santander, on XX/XX/year>, for all business records pertaining to their investigation of the theft. On XX/XX/year> I stopped by my local Santander branch, to simultaneously unfreeze the affected accounts and close them. I made sure that doing so would not nullify my earlier Section 609 ( e ) request for the business records. The Santander representative confirmed to me that the request letter was indeed in my file. 

The law stipulates that the requested documents shall be provided within 30 days of receipt of the request. But after 30 days, and a few more weeksI heard nothing. I stopped by my local branch again on XX/XX/year> and clocked in another couple of hours there. The branch manager established direct contact with the fraud department, but a lot of time was ostensibly spent simply trying to locate my request letter. Where had I sent it? Interesting to get this question, since I'd spent an inordinate amount of time earlier, trying to ascertain from Santander the appropriate address to which to send a Section 609 ( e ) request. I wanted to be sure it got to the right place. And I ultimately sent it to both the postal and email address that a Santander representative supplied, after a 20+ minute hold on the telephone while he sought an answer to my question. As if it were such a novel request, the likes of which nobody 's ever seen before.

My branch manager told me I would hear from him by the following Wednesday. But I did not, not then nor any time afterward. It has become apparent to me that Santander is not operating on good faith, is giving me the run-around, and has no intention of complying with my legal request. Hence my filing this complaint. It's sad ... my mom has had a decades long relationship with this bank, predating earlier takeovers, with millions of dollars of family deposits on account. It's a slap in the face, to be treated so shabbily. Here 's the kicker that symbolizes it all : we received a notification in this period, a letter of warning, that our accounts had exceeded the permitted number of transactions under the terms of our banking agreement, and may be downgraded to an account paying almost nothing in interest, from an account paying slightly more than nothing. What better illustration of Santander 's ineptitude and tone-deafness in all of this? Those " excessive '' transactions, of course, were not perpetrated by us, but rather, the thieves that Santander enabled.