28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

The worse bank. Been extricating myself. Oy vey they suck.

Been doing a refi on my house after a remodel. Easy… except, the account with the Worst Bank in America with my loan:

1. Shows up as a first mortgage on the credit reports.

2. They cannot find in their records as having ever existed.

3. Was sold three years ago to another bank.

4. Does not pull up my LOC with my SSN

5. Cannot communicate with their different data bases across 17 states.

It actually took gobs of phone calls (useless) and a trip to the bank to pay off $16.79 to clear the old LOC. But, my wife went into the bank cause the drive through was useless… and four tellers spent 4 hours scouring their databases to find our current account.

It’s sad. I moved ALL of my business and personal on-line banking to BofA. Their security rocks (so far!) and their on-line facilities let me do just about anything I want, from anywhere in the world and with anyone in the world (sans a few bad places, of course.)

I do NOT own BofA stock. I am just terribly impressed with their services and real geeky customer service people who know how to help.

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28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

My Identity, according to Mellon Bank was stolen. I own some Disney stock and they lost a box of backup archive tapes with all of my details (and a ton of other folks, too.)

They sent me this letter telling me to watch out for bad guys.

Best of all, they subscribed me to a credit monitoring service for free. I have always used one, to the tune of $10 per month, but now I can cancel that and use this one.

No matter: YOU, and everyone should do two things:

1. Monitor your credit with a service. It will tell you within minutes if something has changed.

2. Write to all three credit agencies once a year and get your free credit report. Federal law makes them do this. 30-50% contain errors.

3. Check your online $-everything weekly.

OK, three things.  Do them, though. Please.

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