Too long, but I was upset!
Generally I have had a good experience with USAlliance, the 3% credit card has been good (even if ends at the end of 2022) and their savings rates have been high. But today I ran into a problem which makes me like them a lot less!
Because of the high rates, when I had an IRA certificate mature at Evansville Teachers (ETFCU) I got them to transfer the funds to USAlliance. This was a trustee to trustee transfer, basically institution 1 sends a cashiers check to institution 2, so I don't get involved and avoid any IRS concerns.
So fine, after a few days the funds evidently arrived and a new IRA CD appeared in my USAlliance account. Good!
But (and of course from the post there must be a but..) today I got a message that
A check that was recently deposited into account ending in ABCD has been returned DUPLICATE. Your account has been debited $XXXXX.95 plus a $35.00 return check fee debited from your savings account EFGH
And the balance of the CD was now $0, I have apparently lost tens of thousands of dollars. I would have understood if they had somehow credited the account twice and then remove the second credit, but it looks like they credited once and then debited the whole thing!
Plus, this is a cashiers check that was sent directly to them! Who is trying to deposit it twice!
So, I called and after a while was told that they had presented it on two separate days hence the duplicate notice. And they would enter a research ticket to look into it and I should here in about 48 business hours. Sorry, different department which doesn't talk to customers.
I was a little annoyed at the lack of urgency, it looked like it was just their error and they didn't need any research before removing the funds. I expressed strong displeasure in my British way, which might have been unnoticed by an American CSR.
I also wrote to the retirement person who had helped set this up, but no quick response.
So then I checked with ETFCU to see if they could track the funds. Within 30 minutes, a person there had called me back, providing all the information as to when USAlliance actually collected the funds and the time of their second duplicate attempt. Much more professional and by that stage it was nothing to do with them!
Then I hear back from the USAlliance retirement person, apologizing for the error and everything is now back. And it is, so great.
But (again), I wrote again to the CSRs, asking for it to be send higher, as the experience raised two questions:
1) What would happen if I hadn't complained? In this case, a cert went to zero so it was easy for me to spot, but in some savings or checking account where the amount was say 5-10% Would an audit have caught it.
2) Their mistake cost me a lot of time (I got on this straight away and dropped other things as I don't want 5 figure sums to disappear!) So I asked for some small compensation. Since they originally wanted to charge me $35, I would be willing to accept that as a token...
