Needs new Standard Operating Procedures for "Fraud"
This is not meant to be a rant - more of a word of warning, here's my story over the past month:
I run a small non-profit choir that has to pay musicians for many of our gigs. We just did a gig with over 110 people all getting sub-$500 checks. We have been with US Bank for 3 years, with little issue. Within normal business operations I write a batch of checks to our musicians (which I have done quite a bit in the past). SO I wrote a batch of checks (about 30) and on deposit of the second check, the bank decided to "freeze" the account (without ANY notification). After calling over 72 hours I FINALLY got them to lift the freeze and had to reissue many of the checks (by hand, since we are a non-profit and it all falls on me). I told them which check numbers I was using and they promised they would not hold the account. I switched most of the other payments over to zelle and started doing those in small batches without any issue.
While doing this I had submitted a complaint to the enterprise department asking why they had frozen the account and why no-one could lift the freeze in a timely fashion, and why everything was so siloed no one knew if it was local branch, regional or larger fraud department. Their reply was simply "as we state in our TOS: we don't notify when an account has had a hold placed on it". No other "yeah, we found out the issue, here is how you avoid it", or "this is how you should do business with us when you do these events."
Today, I go to do my zelle batch and I can't get any zelle to work. I call a very nice and helpful customer service agent (not sarcastic, she was great), and she starts doing all kinds of work trying to figure this out - turns out the fraud department has decided to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT and I must go into my branch to close it - WITHOUT TELLING ME!!! No notes in the account, no email, no phone, not even a notice in my online account profile.
So now, I have over 60 people waiting on payment now for about a month, a bank I can't trust to honor checks, and no way for a complaint to actually get processed.
Do you think you should do business with US Bank?
I just can't wrap my head around how ANY bank would operate like this. Every other bank I've been with, sends a text asking if something is fraud or not, not some draconian decisions made by pencil pushers.... Bank Centric not Customer Centric...
Since they are closing my account for me, guess it's easy for me not to be a customer anymore. Good riddance.