Ron Burley ON YOUR SIDE
YOUR MONEY
When Online Checks Go Astray
Lost & Found
A safer way to pay
T
Help! My payment is lost in cyberspace!
Making a deposit at
her bank last February,
Danielle Sellers got a
rude shock: $8,000 had
vanished from her checking account. Stunned, she
turned to the teller and demanded to know what had
happened. The culprit was
an online payment to her
cell phone carrier, Sprint.
Instead of $79.12, she had
been debited $7,912.
Sellers swears she double-checked the amount before
clicking “Send,” but Sprint
wanted proof of the excessive payment and asked her
to fax a bank statement. Days
later, Sprint e-mailed her
that it had closed the case.
That would have been just
fine—except the company
hadn’t refunded a penny.
Online banking is an
Internet-age blessing
when it works. But when
things go wrong, it can be
a curse. In Sellers’s case,
two things went wrong.
The first, of course, was
the missing decimal point.
Typos happen, but they can
be tricky to fix in online
banking. Most banks hire
You can prevent mysterious bank account withdrawals by using a credit
card (that you make sure
to pay off in full each
month, naturally). Doing
so won’t save you from the
occasional typo, but if you
enter an errant amount,
you’ll be disputing what
you owe, rather than trying
to get a refund for a payment already processed.
That’s a much stronger
bargaining position.
payment clearinghouses
to process online transactions. These contractors
typically deduct amounts
from your account right
away but don’t credit the
payee for as long as 10 days.
During that time the payee
cannot verify a payment;
that’s why Sprint request-
ed a fax of Sellers’s bank
statement. But the process
dragged on, which is the
second thing that went
wrong. After a case stalls
for a certain period,
customer-service comput-
ers are programmed to spit
out a “case closed” letter.
That was when Sellers got
in touch with On Your Side.
By the time I called, the
payment had hit Sprint’s
books, and the company
quickly sent a refund.
GOT A
COMPLAINT?
E-mail your customer-service problem
to Ron Burley at aarp.org/ronburley.
