Legal advice...?? Please??
 

My husband and I financed a car through Wells Fargo Auto Finance. We've been trying to pay it off early by making extra payments. We're currently down to owing under $4,000. In March we sent them a payment of $2,200. We had called them and they had given us a special address to send the extra payments to, because they were principal only. So we followed their instructions and sent in the extra money. Two weeks went by, and the checks (one from my personal account and one from our joint account totaling the $2200) cashed. But they had still not been credited to our Wells Fargo account. We got in touch with our bank, and they ran the checks and saw that they were in fact put into Wells Fargo's account. They sent us copies of the checks, and the information we needed to prove that the money was deposited.

We've called Wells Fargo several times, and nothing has been done. We faxed them the info from our bank over six weeks ago. We have Pre-paid legal, and they sent a letter to Wells Fargo over a month ago. Still not credited to my account.

I'll admit we were wrong for not writing the account number on the checks. (We had it on a letter sent with the checks saying that we wanted the money applied to the principal only). but what else can we do? I suppose we will have to file a lawsuit??

I'm so frustrated!! Has anyone been through this? :(

How do you know it was sent to Wells Fargo and it was not a case of ID theft or Phishing scam?

Also, did you write the Better Business Bureau from your state? That helped me without going to Small Claims Court. For some reason, things get resolved very fast after BBB is involved.

And your letters need to be certified, returned receipted if you ever communicate with your bank again. You demand a signature and that they sign it.

And as of now, you are to no longer speak to them by phone. Use the names and extension numbers of who you spoke to in the past. Politely write a business letter stating what you want done succinctly with a fair question, i.e. "I want to know how a payment is posted by your bank?". Everything now is a paper trail... A long one.

And if it were me, I would order all of your credit reports to see what happened.

My bank (Wachovia) went through their fraud department and confirmed it was put into Wells Fargo's account. It was weird because you couldn't read the endorsements. I have a certified letter from Wachovia saying that they had traced it into Wells Fargo's account.

I will contact the better business bureau tomorrow. Thanks!

You can do it online now!!! :D

Better Business Bureau

for credit / finance / money management issues, you can also check out the messageboard CreditBoards. You'll find a lot of useful info there. good luck :)

I'd also, aside from contacting the BBB, contact your AG. I know it's not the same situation, but I had an issue with a company and I threatened to contact the BBB and the AG's in both my state and the state of the incident and what do you know as soon as I made the threat, I got what I wanted.

That would be my suggestion. I don't know where you live, but most if not all Attorney General's offices have a consumer protection division that is used to handling matters like this.

Have you called Wells Fargo Auto Finance about it? If you sent it to their address, they should have the best idea who opens and processes the mail and how it got put into the wrong place. They should be helping you with this.

And when you say it was deposited into "Wells Fargo account" - do you just mean some random persons account at Wells Fargo? Is there any semblance of an account number on the back of check copies? If it's a random personal account, I used to work as a teller and it really shouldn't be too hard to pull work from the day of the deposit and see what happened.

Who have you spoken to at Wells Fargo? Have you gone to their fraud dept? A lawsuit doesn't seem necessary to me at this point. It just sounds like you have not connected with the right people/dept. yet (not your fault, just a point).

We've called Wells Fargo at least five times, and spoken to a manager on at least two of those occasions. It was deposited into the Wells Fargo Auto Finance account, Wachovia's fraud department (where the checks were written)tracked that down. They've given us the C/L and L/B numbers? (You may have a better understanding of that than I do...)

We've gone to their fraud department of both banks and now it's in Wells Fargo's legal department. We've asked for a contact number for the legal and fraud departments of Wells Fargo, and we've been told that they will contact us. (Hasn't happened.) We were initially told that we would have resolution within 20 days, but having first made contact with them (Wells Fargo) on March 26, that hasn't happened. Wachovia has bent over backwards to help us, but Wells Fargo has done nothing really.

Hubby is on his way home from work now, and we are going to sit down and write a complaint to the BBB, and to the Florida AG. However they are not in good standing with the BBB. And have many unresolved complaints.

http://data.phoenix.bbb.org/commonre...l?bid=37001371

Thanks for all the help, and I'll keep updating.

Can you not go to a Wells Fargo bank in person and talk to someone there about the payment and your account? I would think you could handle any Wells Fargo business at one of its branches, but maybe I'm wrong. If possible, I'd go in there and tell them that you're not leaving until someone addresses the matter.

Unfortunately, there aren't any branches here. :( We are in Central Florida, and their Auto Finance is done in Phoenix.

We sent an e-mail to the contact info they had on the Better Business Bureau website: (personal info edited out :p )

Dear Ms. F,

I found your contact information through the Better Business Bureau, and I'm contacting you in hopes that you can help us. On March 12, 2007 we sent in an extra payment on our account to be applied to the principal. We mailed in two checks one from my personal checking account (check number xxxx, in the amount of $1,800) and one from our joint checking account (check number xxxx, in the amount of $400). Both checks cleared our checking accounts on March 19, 2007. Both payments were sent to Wells Fargo in the same envelope and addressed to Wells Fargo Auto Finance, PO Box 29704, Phoenix, AZ 85038.

We have information from Wachovia (our bank) indicating that they were indeed deposited into Wells Fargo's account. However the funds have still not been credited to our Wells Fargo Account (number zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz). In March we faxed the information we had gathered, to Wells Fargo, but no action has been taken. We have contacted Wells Fargo on at least five occasions and feel we are getting the run-around treatment.

We are hoping that you can help us with this issue, so that we will not be forced to take any further action. We will, however, continue to persue this and are working with DeBeaubien, Knight, Simmons, Mantzaris & Neal, LLP law firm. We do not wish to file a lawsuit, but it has been over six weeks since we first sent the information we gathered to Wells Fargo, and phone calls are leading us no where. We have been unable to speak with the same person twice, and no direct phone numbers have been provided.

Please contact us as soon as possible regarding this situation.

Sincerely,

Summer and Adam B
Phone Number
Address

The Tax Store, LLC
956 N. Cocoa Blvd
Suite 1117
Cocoa, FL 32922

--Internet Email Confidentiality Notice--
Privileged / Confidential Information may be contained in this message. If you are not the addressee indicated in this message (or responsible for delivery of the message to such person) you may not copy or deliver this message to anyone. In such case, you should destroy this message and kindly notify the sender by reply email. Please advise immediately if you or your employer do not consent to Internet email for messages of this kind. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to official business of my firm shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by it.
Unless otherwise expressly stated, nothing in this message, or in any attachments, is intended to, or can, be used by any recipient to avoid imposition of federal tax penalties.

I had a similar incident with my car payment about 5 years ago. I had been making payments over the phone. I saved up and made a $1,000 payment one month. About 2 weeks later, I got a "courtesy" call asking why I hadn't made a payment. I informed them that I did, gave them the transaction number and the date that I made the call. They looked it up on my screen information and saw that I did call in that date and made a payment. A week later I got another "courtesy" call asking why I still hadn't made a payment. Basically, like you, they had credited my payment to someone else. I sent copies of the canceled check and they still hadn't credited my account. They were saying to me: Yes, we know you made that payment, but we credited it to someone else. We can't credit it to you until we find the money. Me: I don't care that you credited it to someone else. That is your problem. I have proved that I made the payment. I want my credit now.

So here is what I did: I started calling them everyday. Everytime I called, I asked for the name of the person that I was speaking to and wrote it, along with the date and time that we spoke. Before we hung up, I read back to them the gist of our conversation: what we had spoken about and what they said they were doing to resolve it on their end. I also asked to speak to managers. The managers were always amazed that I had the dates, times, customer service rep, and conversation topics listed and able to repeat it back. I didn't scream, yell, or berate the person on the other end. I did say continually, "This is what your company has said they will do. Can you please explain why it hasn't been done?" Or, in your case, "I'm sorry, but I don't want to wait for you to call me, I need to know how YOU are going to resolve this." Is it a pain in the neck to call everyday? Yes. But, I got results within about a 1 1/2 weeks.

Ahh, ok. I was a little confused on all of that. I thougt it was a matter of it being deposited into a regular personal account. Still, Wells Fargo should be handling all of it - it's their mistake and they should be correcting it. They should have all the information they need from the info Wachovia's fraud dept. provided.

If I were you, as much as you shouldn't have to do this, I would call call WF Auto Finance every day and keep asking for the manager. In fact, ask for that person's manager. Keep hounding them until you get something.

Also, keep all of this well documented so in the future, if it comes up on your credit report that you have late payments, you have full explanation (Though one late payment is usually never even looked twice at, so don't worry too much about that!).

Good luck!!!!

Hm, banks do not make mistakes!:mad:

Between Wells Fargo and Bank of America, I am not sure which is worse.

Document everythime you call with time, date, and persons name.

I am sure that a Good Lawyer could end up sueing for damages as they can and will transfer this to your credit report then look out!:mad:

Suggest taht you always finance through a local bank from now on.


Good Luck!:)

We are still making all of our regular payments. We have worked hard to get a good credit report (we did some stupid things early in our marriage... but now are both in the 700's with hubby almost to 800 Fico score), so I'd rather keep making payments and not screw with the credit record.

We left another message with our lawyer about our next step.