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September, 2010:

Is Bank Of America Not Above Extortion?

Today Bank Of America appears to try to loose as many customers as possible in one fell swoop. With no prior notice I found myself having no option but to either consent to a new disclosure, requiring me to hire an attorney on the spot, or loose online access to my accounts.

Their online service gives you one opportunity to continue to do online banking and from there on you are locked out, unless you agree! I cannot but wonder what kind of buffoon would resort to these kinds of tactics?

Is a corporation of the size of Bank Of America unable to give their customers enough time to properly review the changes to their Electronic Communications Disclosure? What would prompt them to take such drastic measure? Either they don’t care about customers, which I suppose would really would not be something new, or some amateur threw it together without any thought at all over how this will affect their customers.

It certainly CAN be a very benevolent change, but how can I, a mere layman, be expected to understand the legalese that I have to consent to? Words have different meanings in law than they do in plain English, potentially creating a minefield.

Bank Of America does offer me the opportunity for to withdraw my consent, but only after I give Bank Of America a “reasonable period of time to act upon my withdrawal”. Of course it’s good for Bank Of America to have the unspecified time to make their change, but we won’t have that courtesy of a couple of days.

The language used appear plain but again not being an attorney I have no idea what might mean something different than what I read in to it. Initially it seem to suggest that I need to be able to SUPPORT certain hardware and software requirements. However at the very end I need to confirm that I HAVE the required hardware and software. Sounds like an important switch to me, but then I’m not an attorney.

About the only thing good is that they support the Chrome browser from Google.
Other than that I’m left with the careless implementation of their updated Electronic Communication Disclosure, which supposedly is updated to better serve me. Guess they don’t really have a clue of what is better for me.

I wonder how many other people will say this is not how I want to be treated as a customer, and take their business elsewhere?