In early 2010, with growing concern for what the banking industry has been doing to extract additional money from their customers, my wife and I decided that we needed to pay off our credit card debts and consolidate all of our banking into the Affinity Federal Credit Union, a local institution that we are a member of.

As part of this process we electronically sent a payment of about $11,000 to pay off a Capital One credit card. My wife contacted a Capital One service representative to close the account and they informed us that we owed another $83 to close the account. The representative offered to change our payment to include the $83 and my wife agreed to this.

The next day we realized that instead of adding $83 to the payment we made, the representative had deducted the full amount again, overcharging us by $11,000! My wife contacted Capital One in a panic. They immediately admitted the stupid mistake, but they said it would take TWO OR THREE WEEKS for them to return our stolen $11,000! They were able to take the money with a “click of a mouse”, but they insisted that they could not just undo the transaction. Meanwhile other payments and checks we had made from that account would be bouncing all over the place. My wife went through every representative and manager she could talk to, but they insisted they were going to hold our money. She was in tears by the time we gave up for the day. Our good credit rating and good name would now be tarnished because of this uncaring company’s callous actions.

Luckily, the account that Capital One had stolen our money from was an Affinity Credit Union account. My wife went to them (they are located at her workplace) and explained what was happening. They could not believe that Capital One would operate like that. They were able to snatch our money back from Capital One and lock them out of any further access to our account. One check had already bounced but they removed the overdraft charge since it was not our fault. Affinity had saved the day!

The people that we were dealing with at Capital One were just a voice on the phone and they could not have cared less about what they had done to us. In stark contrast, we were able to deal face to face with our friends at Affinity, and they went to bat for us and solved our problem. As you can imagine, it will be a cold day in hell before we again deal with any banker we can’t shake hands with!