According to a lengthy article in today's New York Times, if you, or more likely, your elderly relative, finds that you're dealing with Wachovia Bank, directly or indirectly, grab your money and run.
The reason is that Wachovia (whose name, to me, reeks of Lutheran probity and correctness) is pretty friendly to schemes that allow checks to be written on the accounts of other banks without the checks having to be signed. The method, which is legal, is used by organizations that have been authorized to bill bank accounts directly for recurring fees -- gym memberships, for example, or association dues. The scam is that these charges aren't authorized by the person whose account is getting drained. In many cases, the charge is noticed, the person's bank is notified, and Wachovia refunds the money, but in many cases, it isn't -- and, either way, Wachovia doesn't try to identify the accounts that are the source of these bogus charges, and shut them down. They seem to like making the money that processing the checks makes them much more than they care about protecting customers of other banks -- who, as it turns out, are frequently the very old, or the addled, who aren't always sure that they didn't authorize the charge, anyway.
Scum, all of them.
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