Sacramento man writes check for $400, bank reads it as $4,000. What it took to get his money back.
SACRAMENTO – A Sacramento man said his bank added a zero to a check he wrote.
When it put his account in the red, he reached out to CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team to ask for help. But, what really upset Gerald Monroe Mann was how long the bank told him it would take to fix the mess.
"How can you treat me this way?" asked Mann, a longtime customer of Wells Fargo Bank.
Mann wrote a check for $400. It's handwritten in words, too. But, Wells Fargo interpreted it as $4,000 and that drained Mann's checking and savings accounts.
The scenario put him nearly $900 in the red.
"I'm not rich," Mann said. "Yeah. Money is important."
Mann spent hours on the phone with his bank. He said they told him it would take 10 business days to investigate the matter. That left him without access to his own money.
"Now I'm screwed because you screwed up," Mann said, referring to his bank. "Not cool."
So, how does something like this happen? And, if it's clearly the bank's mistake, why does it take so long to fix it?
The federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates banks, calls this type of mistake an encoding error. Essentially, a computer misread the amount of the check.
But, 10 business days? That's essentially two weeks for the bank to fix its mistake.
"Why would they treat me like that?" Mann asked. "I've been a really good customer."
Wells Fargo did not explain why it needed that long to investigate.
"As soon as Wells Fargo learned what happened, the customer was credited within four business days," according to a Wells Fargo statement.
After our initial story was published, Wells Fargo provided an additional statement:
"We are pleased we could help resolve this matter for our customer. As an industry, banks must follow an established process, which includes allotted timeframes to investigate and help customers reclaim funds involving check disputes. We work to complete the process as quickly as possible on behalf of our customers..."
Mann said he went eight days without his money.
"When they make a mistake, it shouldn't be the person's problem," he said. "This can't be the first time it happened. And, you need to have something in place to take care of this. So people aren't screwed in the process."
Mann did not face any overdraft charges or fees, and had resources to cover some of his bills while he was out of that money.
Should this happen to you, you could ask your bank for provisional credit – that's money back in your account while the bank investigates.
By the way, if you write different amounts in the numbers box versus the text line, the government said, "Words prevail over numbers."
We continue to investigate the process of check cashing and what measures, if any, are in place to prevent this type of error.
If you have a consumer problem, CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team are here for you. Go to CBS13.com/CallKurtis and fill out our form.