
Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today - Leustad
Happened everyone today. If you have a bill payment which paid yesterday, processed today and will be sent tomorrow, I&#x27;d say go check your account. Mine and my wife&#x27;s account along with a lot of people got double charged today. We&#x27;ve called the customer service and they&#x27;ve said that everyone was charged double and they are fixing it.<p>Well, this sounds like wells fargo played with our money overnight and giving them back to us.<p>What are your thoughts?
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thisisit
They have gone through a massive investigation so doing something like this is
strange.

So, until proven otherwise it's safer to assume Hanlon's razor - Never
attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

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neosavvy
I was just thinking of switching all my accounts from Chase to Wells Fargo
because Chase isn't located in my new town.

This is a good reminder as to why I should choose a different bank. Thanks for
posting.

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ams6110
Use a local credit union. None of the big national banks have demonstrated
that they can be trusted.

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rconti
For anyone worried about leaving a "big" bank, often credit unions will offer
mobile deposit and free (reimbursed) ATM withdrawls. I'm actually happier
using a bank with no local branches because there's no more thinking about
driving to the "right" ATM. (mine reimburses up to $15/mo which is more than
enough for me; these days even the sketchy taqueria ATMs only charge $1.25 or
so where it used to be $3+)

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semi-extrinsic
WTF do you use ATM withdrawals for at a frequency where you care about $3
charges?

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jklein11
If you are taking out $100 at a time that is 3%

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pfarnsworth
I used to work in payments. This happens sometimes, it's a bug it's not
something nefarious, and it's really disruptive.

Many, many people will be put in a negative balance. Wells Fargo is probably
one of those banks that don't order bill payments chronologically, but
probably by amount, so things could get very very messy. There will be a lot
of NSF charges that will need to be reversed, or Line of Credit charges for
those accounts that have automatic line of credit to avoid NSF charges. But
missed payments because of NSF will also be a problem as well, unless Wells
Fargo foots the entire extra amount so that customers don't get massively
fucked up.

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segmondy
I work in payments too. I don't know how this happens using an ACID DB.
Everything is done within a transaction and extra checks are done to make sure
that payments/debits happen ONCE and all once.

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gowld
Probably two separate databases.

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segmondy
Distributed Transactions

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tristor
I was once double charged on an auto-billed mortgage payment two weeks before
Christmas causing all my other bills to bounce. This is why I no longer trust
auto billing services from anyone and hate Wells Fargo.

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cortesoft
It might happen every now and then, but I still trust auto-pay to make fewer
mistakes than me. I have accidentally missed bills way more often than auto
pay has messed up.

Plus, when auto pay messes up, the bank will usually make it right and you
don’t have to pay any fees. If you mess up, you will have to eat the fees
(usually).

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HenryBemis
Probably some job scheduling issue; maybe a job got stuck (dependencies or
what have you) and the techie just thought to re-run the job(s) without
checking the progress of the "stuck one". I could as well have ran for 99.999%
and got stuck on the last account (ZZTop's:) and then it run again
"successfully" and the techie went home happy for saving the day. And after
all the complains start coming in IT thought just what I thought and went
through the support tickets and saw the "Job-Mother-Of-All-Payments" was ran
twice.

Now they should be having a chat with their BAs and their Finance on how to
reverse the duplicates.

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bridanp
Unfortunately I was part of one of these at a much smaller bank in the past. A
job that "memo posted" checking accounts failed. When we restarted the job, we
tagged the restart to the wrong step. We should have hit the restore step
first, prior to the posting failure. Instead, we tagged the one right after,
duplicating the posting for all accounts that had successfully passed on the
first run. It was thousands of transactions that had to be backed out before
they were hard posted. It was an awful feeling when we realized it, made more
awful to know we caused people so much trouble that day. Anyway, I'm telling
the story because it doesn't have to be because Wells Fargo is inherently bad.
Their management has made some significant errors lately that could be
considered criminal. But in this case, I'd side with it being program, job
scheduling, or technical admin errors. I'm almost 100% positive the people
responsible are just sick about it right now.

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strict9
Ugh, saw this and checked. Yep, my mortgage payment taken out twice, with a
plethora of overdraft protection notices afterward as it keeps taking money
out of my other accounts.

Inertia, and the fact I don't want to lose a credit card acct I've had open
forever, has kept me with WF. But those two are rapidly becoming nothing
compared to all the BS from this bank.

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forbiddenlake
Don't close the credit card, but move everything else away, and put one bill
on the card (or just use it twice a year for gum)?

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craftyguy
I don't think you even need to do that? I had a wells fargo cc open for over a
decade with only 1 charge in the previous 8 years. I closed it last year
because, fuck wells fargo.

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cortesoft
If there is no fee, keeping it open can help your credit score; a major factor
for your credit is what percentage of your available credit you use, so having
a credit card you don’t use simply adds to your total available credit.

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dronescanfly
Honest question: Shouldn't credit be measured solely on the basis of currently
available money and monthly income? (+how responsible you were with previous
credit repayments)

I don't comprehend how having a cc but not actually using it leads to being
trusted more

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toast0
The credit scoring alhorithms don't look at historic balances for credit
cards, just current balance and available credit, status and age of the
account. Having an account open for a long time that isn't currently late is a
proxy for 'has paid bills consistently' even if it may not be accurate. If you
regularly were really late, the algorithm assumes your account would have been
closed.

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denvercoder904
This happened to my girlfriend's checking account last week. She was charged
an overdraft fee because auto pay decided to charge two days earlier. Then all
traces of the transaction magically disappeared from her transaction history.
Luckily, she took some screenshots of it. We just shrugged it off but I'm
going to investigate it now.

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cortesoft
Did the overdraft fee also disappear?

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zaptheimpaler
I wouldn't assume it was intentional, could very well be a bug. Anyways, as
long as they fix it soon... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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jmpz
Not seeing any other reference to this in the news..

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astura
[http://www.statesman.com/business/wells-fargo-customers-
find...](http://www.statesman.com/business/wells-fargo-customers-find-
accounts-drained-mistaken-double-charges/PP0dDlnbsATuGFYwcm7q4O/)

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jdblair
This morning its all fixed and the balance is correct. The double transactions
were all in "pending" when I went to sleep (including overdraft transfers). I
bet this isn't the first time something like this has happened due to a glitch
in an overnight batch job.

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neverbroken907
I was double charged as well! Just got off the phone with customer service
after a mini heart attack. They say this will be fixed by 8am...but why in the
hell did it happen in the first place? I found this thread searching for any
news on this "system glitch".

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Leustad
As of this morning, all duplicate charges was cleared. Charged amounts
returned to the accounts and the over draft fees was erased.

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WindowsFon4life
First month off of WF, and I'm soo happy.

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AlexandrB
I think it's time for Wells Fargo to get out of retail banking. Between the
several well-documented instances of account fraud and now this it's apparent
their priorities are not about providing good customer service to individuals.

