In March I started paying my gardener electronically, Bank of America to Bank of America. It did NOT involve Zelle or anything like that. It was NOT a wire. It was a transfer within Bank of America, which they still allow. (Many banks have gotten away from this, and only do things like Zelle now.)
I did two of these -- one in March, and one in June. The March transfer worked as expected. The June transfer did not. He claims he didn't get the money.
My statement shows that he DID receive the money.
You'd think this would be a simple thing to rectify, but it's not. Bank of America has been terrible about it.
The customer service number rep acknowledged that both the March and June transfers went to the same account, and both appear to have been completed. That rep could NOT look into it any further or verify that the money is really in the guy's account. I was referred to the "disputes" department.
The disputes department sucked. The rep kept pushing me towards a "recall" procedure, where I basically would be trying to get the money back. This would be a good thing in case the money really vanished somewhere in their system (or went to the wrong person), but would be useless in case my gardener is just making a mistake and isn't seeing it properly that he really got the money. If it's the latter, the "recall" will simply fail, and I'll have no proof of anything for the gardener. This will also take 3 weeks, so I'm hesitant to even try it.
I asked if they could simply send me some written acknowledgment that the money I sent in June went to his account, but they said they have no way to do this. I got cited a bunch of idiotic examples which don't apply, such as, "When you wire money, you can't see what happens on the other end" and "This happens all the time when people send money to other countries", but this is moronic reasoning because we are dealing with a transfer within the same bank within the same state. I was also told that they wouldn't be able to tell me if he got the money for "privacy reasons", which again is absurd because it's my money sent by me, so of course I should be able to find out if it went to the intended recipient.
I kept being pushed over and over to do this stupid recall. When I asked for a supervisor, the guy had to contact one via Skype, who said she will call me "as soon as possible". When I asked for clarification as to what that meant, I was snarkily told, "She said to tell you again, 'as soon as possible'." When I asked a third time for a real timetable for the phone call, I was quoted an hour, which of course has since passed and nobody has called me. Large companies were always bad with calling people back, but since the days of COVID, it's extremely difficult to get phone calls.
I'm going crazy. I just want to get something to show the gardener that he actually got the $, and then he can call customer service himself (or go into a branch, whatever) to have them figure out why it's not showing up. The guy doesn't speak very good English, so it's been hard to explain to him what's been going on here. I asked him today via e-mail if he'll show me his statement with the missing transaction, but I'm not sure if he will agree to this (or even understand what I'm trying to ask).
Anyone have any experience with something like this? What do you suggest I do next?
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Originally Posted by Tellafriend
