| TLDR: I feel your pain. I went to Scottrade and asked them to close my account, back in 2007 or 2008. They said "sure," cashed out the account, left it open, and continued sending me account status emails for almost ten years. Last week they told me I had a negative balance of $13. I called them and they can't give me any information over the phone, because I don't know my old address or phone number from whenever I opened the account. (I don't know when that is, only that it was before 2007 or so.) So I have to go into a physical office. And where I live now, the nearest physical office is more than 60 miles away. And they're not open on weekends. And they can apply fees to this negative balance, spiral those fees out of control, refer it to a collections agency, and put it on my credit report, all without ever once breaking the law. So I have to drive 60 miles both ways, because almost ten years ago, one of their employees was too lazy to do their job correctly. And I can't even do it on the weekend. US consumer law has terrific protections for all the problems that were legitimate risks 100 years ago, but it sucks today. Effectively, the burden of proof is now on me to demonstrate that this $13 fee is not my problem. |
I cashed & closed it, but the teller must not have actually closed it because they decided to charge it $10/mo for some stupid bank-fee reason. It was diving into negative numbers for months before I discovered it.