Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today

I was just thinking of switching all my accounts from Chase to Wells Fargo because Chase isn't located in my new town.

This is a good reminder as to why I should choose a different bank. Thanks for posting.

99.9% this is what happened. No bank wants silly mistakes like this on their track record. Reversing all duplicates, cleaning up after alarms & penalties caused by overdrafts due to this mistakes, these are pains that no bank wants.

Just my obligatory criticism of Hanlons razor, it's a logically fallacious statement and should be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual discussion where it belongs.

I work in payments too. I don't know how this happens using an ACID DB. Everything is done within a transaction and extra checks are done to make sure that payments/debits happen ONCE and all once.

It might happen every now and then, but I still trust auto-pay to make fewer mistakes than me. I have accidentally missed bills way more often than auto pay has messed up.

Plus, when auto pay messes up, the bank will usually make it right and you don’t have to pay any fees. If you mess up, you will have to eat the fees (usually).

Agreed. I'm to the point in my life where I'm generally liquid to 2x my monthly expenses - but I've set up an auto-reminder system over auto-pay because of failures in the past.

Maybe it's the former poor person in me, but I don't trust anyone else to take money out of my account.

Fwiw, almost a decade with Chase bill pay, and no issues ever. I even once misrouted one due to my own fault, and they resolved it in 4 business days or so. Like every other bank, they have some warts, but bill pay is solid.

This isn't just any News, it's Hacker News.

Unfortunately I was part of one of these at a much smaller bank in the past. A job that "memo posted" checking accounts failed. When we restarted the job, we tagged the restart to the wrong step. We should have hit the restore step first, prior to the posting failure. Instead, we tagged the one right after, duplicating the posting for all accounts that had successfully passed on the first run. It was thousands of transactions that had to be backed out before they were hard posted. It was an awful feeling when we realized it, made more awful to know we caused people so much trouble that day. Anyway, I'm telling the story because it doesn't have to be because Wells Fargo is inherently bad. Their management has made some significant errors lately that could be considered criminal. But in this case, I'd side with it being program, job scheduling, or technical admin errors. I'm almost 100% positive the people responsible are just sick about it right now.

Hah! Yeah, probably. No ops person I've met has NOT made this mistake. The more you touch, the more likely you are to break something. It's bound to happen eventually. So, when it does, you buckle down and hope that ALL_CAPS_REG_JOB_X-22 wasn't that important.

A NOC I worked at used to send company-wide pages (in 2008..) whenever something important broke. "Inadvertently" was used maybe once a month!

Ah...overdraft protection. Useful if you would otherwise have bounced a check to a third party--but very annoying when the bad check is to your own bank!

My Bank of America checking account had overdraft protection that automatically would cover the overdraft from my Bank of America credit card.

I normally kept that checking account near zero, and would do a transfer from savings at the ATM to cover any checks I mailed that day. One day I didn't get around to doing that transfer and the check I had written that day bounced.

That check was to pay off my credit card bill, which I paid in full every month so as to not incur any interest charges.

Let's assume that I owed $200 on the credit card.

Result:

1. Check is not sufficient. The overdraft protection kicks in, and my credit card is charged $200 to pay off the $200 that was due on my credit card...so basically a no-op except...

2. I'm hit with an overdraft fee on the checking account, and a cash advance fee on the credit card.

The cash advance fee was quite a bit more than the interest would have been if I had simply skipped trying to pay the credit card bill that month.

The bank software really should be smart enough to recognize payments between accounts at that bank, and handle errors such as overdrafts more intelligently.

Don't close the credit card, but move everything else away, and put one bill on the card (or just use it twice a year for gum)?