Do you like getting lied to and cheated by your bank, all with the worst customer service I've ever experienced? If so, Wells Fargo is definitely your type of place. If not, bank anywhere else, please. You can read the long version of my experience below:
I started a business that required online credit card processing and, not knowing any better at the time, decided to use Wells Fargo as both my account holder and merchant services provider. The first red flag should have been the fact that they wanted us to sign a contract for the merchant services that included a three year term, a $3500 early cancellation fee and a $25 per month fee regardless of whether or not anything was processed plus 3% of transactions and, perhaps the most ridiculous of all, we had to make a transfer at least once per month to avoid another fee. It being a startup, we told them that we would not be signing a three year contract on anything. They agreed to that change, made it and we all signed and loaded the account with a few grand.
Our developer was moving pretty slowly on our application so it ended up being a few months before we processed anything. Let me tell you how much fun it is to see $25 per month leave for absolutely no value. We also had to send someone to the bank once per month to make the stupid transfer and avoid another fee. By the time our website was operational, we had immediate problems with credit cards being processed by Wells Fargo. The money would take forever to land in our account and the processing was incredibly unstable - there were constant errors.
After a swing and a miss on the business, we decided to close up shop and move on. What should have been a 10 minute visit to the bank to close out the accounts turned into multiple months of fighting with Wells Fargo's unbelievable incompetent employees. First, they closed our main business checking account but not the merchant services account. We didn't know it until we got a notice that the account we no longer had was overdrawn because they'd tried to pull out the $25 merchant services fee. Finding no money in the closed account, they charged an overdraft fee. We called and were unable to resolve it then went down a few days later to find that they'd continued to charge the overdraft fee for days, resulting in hundreds of dollars in fees in an account that was closed because of an account that was supposed to be closed. After over an hour and 4-5 employees working on it, they fixed the problem and assured us that everything was now closed.
A few weeks later, we received a notice that we were in breach of our three year contract for merchant services and owed Wells Fargo $3500. That's right, the contract that we'd had amended to have no term now had a term. Another unsuccessful phone call and we had to go down again. This time, we were there for over two hours. The manager insisted that we had signed the contract with a term although he couldn't produce the contract. He called us liars and tried every trick in the book to get us to pay the fee. We refused and returned several days later with the contract that we had luckily retained a copy of showing that there was no term. Having no leg left to stand on, they eventually reversed the fee and we were finally free of Wells Fargo.
Why people tolerate Wells Fargo in an age of commoditized banking and awesome web-based credit card processing is beyond me. If you value your time, money and sanity, please, go literally anywhere but Wells Fargo. A mattress would be a better choice for your money. read more
