San Diego National Bank turned me down for a checking account, telling me that Union Bank had issued a negative ChexSystems report on me that would prevent me from opening a checking account at any reputable bank for 5 years. My husband was very distraught by the news but frankly I was not very surprised. When my husband got back into town, we went to Union Bank with me and tried again to get some answers. We spoke with Kevin, who had basically refused to discuss the matter with us last time. Kevin remembered us and seemed much more sympathetic this time.
The most immediate problem was that I had a check from Union Bank for over $30,000 issued in my name and no way to deposit it since I could not open a checking account at any bank. I asked if they would re-issue the check in my husband’s name and Kevin said that that was not a problem, and they did re-issue the check for me. I asked again for an explanation about why they had closed my account and accused me of structuring, etc. We looked at my account activity and Kevin could not see anything out of the ordinary in the history and seemed puzzled by it himself. Lastly, I asked why they had reported me as a deadbeat to ChexSystems, which is the equivalent of a banking credit report. Kevin said that it seemed very unlikely that they would have reported something on me, but that he did not have that information available.
He tried to get someone on the phone from their fraud department but they do not take incoming calls even from bank employees. Kevin left some messages with them and later that day Mimi from the fraud department called me. She said that she did not have access to my account information, and could not tell me specifically why they had closed my account other than the fact that my account required too much monitoring because of the account activity. That was not very helpful, so I moved on and asked her about the negative ChexSystems report. She said that (although she could not see my account information) they would not have issued a Chex System report on me. I read her the letter that San Diego National Bank had given me. Her conclusion was that it must have been some error on ChexSystems’ part and told me that I would have to take it up with ChexSystems. Not very helpful, but she was polite about it and adamant that although she had no way of checking, that under the circumstances Union Bank would not have issued the ChexSystems report. We’ll see…
