After Six Days of Outages, BofA Claims It Hasn't Been Hacked 315
Lucas123 writes "After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack."
Divulging (Score:4, Insightful)
a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening
I don't think that word means what you think it means...
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I guess they were going for the archaic version:
Definition of DIVULGE
transitive verb
1
archaic : to make public : proclaim
Re:Divulging (Score:4, Funny)
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I could care less.
Their lack of disclosure is very worrysome (Score:2)
Re:Their lack of disclosure is very worrysome (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just bank with a better institution. I just read earlier today that BofA is going to institute a $5/month fee for the "privilege" of using your debit card (which of course is on top of the 3% fee they charge to the merchant). Why does anyone still have an account with this company? It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with. There's also thousands of credit unions.
At this point, it seems like anyone that still has an account with BofA must be a moron.
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At least some speculation in the media has been that some or all of BofA's system problems may be due to self-inflicted system load increase in the form of large number of online account inquiries and cancellations prompted by the debit card service fee.
So they have slashdotted themselves? (Score:2)
At least some speculation in the media has been that some or all of BofA's system problems may be due to self-inflicted system load increase in the form of large number of online account inquiries and cancellations prompted by the debit card service fee.
Priceless.
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Took care of that last year, when I was bitten by their nasty habit of processing debits before credits (one emergency purchase later, in spite of getting paid the night before they processed the check)...
Much happier at the local credit union. Now, they pay me 7% on my checking account balance, and I get reimbursed for any ATM fees I incur. TBH, I wish I would have done this years ago.
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You should maybe start to wonder, where those 7% are payed from. Due to TANSTAAFL [wikipedia.org] your local credit union must be in some high risk operation for earning that interest.
I believe a citation needed is in order here (Score:2)
Where the hell could you possibly find 7% per month guaranteed. People would put millions in that. Best I find online is 2% from a no-name place, and 1% from places like ING. Those are for savings too, not checking.
Nobody is willing to pay 7% with the central bank rate and economy as it is. If they are, then they are doing something illegal or risky (which with money in checking accounts would be illegal). To get 7% you'd need to be in corporate junk bonds, like Ca or worse. For those the historical rate of
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Maybe. That is still awful high for checking. Money is just dirt cheap right now, like I said hard to get more than a percent even from traditional high yield places. ING only offers 0.25% for normal checking accounts (as in ones that don't have tons of money in them). The CUs here are offering 0.05-0.25% depending on the CU and the kind of checking account.
I have trouble believing one would do 0.7%.
I think he may have just been making shit up. Unfortunately, something I've noticed with haters is they often
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Oh, they still exist. You just have to look around. I've been using Lee County Bank & Trust's reward checking account for 2 or 3 years now. They started out paying 4.5% or so on balances up to $25K. Now they "only" pay 2.5%. (I do expect this deal, and others like it, to evaporate once the new restrictions on debit card fees go into effect, since the "catch" with these deals is you have to use your debit card at least 10 or so times per month, so that the banks
Re:Their lack of disclosure is very worrysome (Score:5, Informative)
(which of course is on top of the 3% fee they charge to the merchant)
No, it's instead of the 3% fee they charge the merchant. The whole reason they're going to make the debit card user pay the fee instead of having the merchant pass the fee along to the user through the product price is because as of a few days ago [federalreserve.gov], it's illegal for them to charge the merchant more than $0.21 + 0.05%. Now I'm all for turning hidden fees into non-hidden ones, but we all know that merchants aren't going to reduce their prices now that they no longer have to pay large debit card fees.
It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with.
What about banks that don't charge a debit card fee? The number of those is definitely on the decline. Wells Fargo, Chase, and SunTrust are also planning on charging accountholders a fee to use their debit cards.
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You could stop using banks, and go visit a local credit union. I had a long meeting with a loan officer at my bank, and a week later, found out I wasn't approved for a used car loan that I wanted (they got ALL my info backwards somehow, and the loan officer couldn't actually approve, and had to send it off to some department).. Called a local credit union, was talking to a person in less than 3 rings, and was approved for the car loan (at a better rate) over the phone, in about 5 min. I pulled out of tha
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The banks have to make money somewhere
Yes, it's called "interest". 35 years ago, there were no fees for writing checks, and that was the common way to pay for your groceries, even though it's obviously a far less efficient way of transferring money than debit cards. You went to a bank, got a checking account, paid for a book of checks, and used those to pay for your groceries and bills. Banks had to have people and equipment to process all these pieces of paper. But somehow, they didn't have to charge f
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The problem with trying to make laws to fine-tune the "consumer experience" is that they forget some minor little item. This time they forgot to include that the banks shouldn't be passing their costs for debit card processing onto customers rather than merchants.
I guess the Congressfolks never dreamed that this revenue was going to come from somewhere else if they blocked banks getting it from the merchants.
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If you have less than one months cash in savings, you're financially on your deathbed anyway.
Thank you, Suzie Orman. Now someone please call a medic!
I had gone about 2 years without hearing or seeing that woman.
I had completely forgot she existed.
And you reminded me.
Fuck you.
Like the alternative is so much better (Score:5, Insightful)
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Makes you wonder what would make customers more uncomfortable- bad security or total incompetence? Though I would feel oh so much better with the statement "We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do." That just warms the cockles.
Re:Like the alternative is so much better (Score:4)
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Throw up your cake and lose it too.
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"We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do."
Translation: "We don't have a f***ing clue."
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What are the chances this is intentional stalling to make it difficult for their customers to cancel accounts after their new debit card fees?
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Well, it is much better than admitting everyone is trying to get their money out due to the new debit card fees.
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Re:Like the alternative is so much better (Score:4)
"We're not being attacked, we just are totally incompetent and can't keep our site up under normal conditions"
It's not a normal conditions, they can't keep up with the throngs of angry customers closing their bank accounts. [time.com]
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I am beginning to think I believe this. Apparently, with the public recognition of people leaving BofA, it encourages more customers to leave as well. This is the kind of invisible hand I like seeing in action.
And as we can see, the invisible hand is something of a myth as the bank has not decided to back down on its new fees... well it has backed down for people who maintain more than $5k in their accounts. But you know, I would never keep that much money in a checking account. I keep whatever I can af
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What does banking in general have to do with the free market? In a free market, all the big banks would have failed, and the invisible hand would have redistributed their resources to other financial institutions that did a better job of risk management.
Learn the difference between fascism and free market economic systems. Knowing the difference might just save your life one day.
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A free market is like communism: sounds good in theory, but impossible to put into practice.
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Free market is available in banking. Just don't feed the big companies. Do business with a small bank, or better yet, a credit union. If the bank gets bought out, move to another. Great thing about a credit union is that it belongs to the account holders, who won't sell it to a bigger bank. If we insist on small banks/credit unions, and customers consistently move away from larger ones, there will continue to be lots of small banks, maintaining a real free market.
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Actually, here, you're partially right. With banks, there's tons of alternatives: there's thousands of smaller banks and credit unions across the country, so it befuddles me why all these people were still using BofA.
However, this isn't the case in many markets. Internet access, for instance: in most places, there's either one or two providers possible, and that's it. You can't have a free market when there's only one or two providers of something. In many other markets, it's not much better: there's on
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Re:Like the alternative is so much better (Score:4, Insightful)
There should be a law that allows you to choose your lender, i.e., your mortgage can't be sold unless you approve the transfer. When you first buy a house, you have a choice in who you borrow money from: it's the institution that you go to to apply for your mortgage. But after that, if it gets sold, you have no control over who it gets sold to. That's not right. You signed on to be indebted to company X, not company Y or Z that wants to buy your debt.
Would you willingly borrow money from Vinnie the Loanshark? Probably not, unless you're really desperate. Why not? Because you don't like the way he treats his customers. So you borrow money from someplace that treats their customers/debtors better. But what if you got a loan from ABC Financial Services, and then they sold the loan to Vinnie, who then threatened to break your kneecaps? You never signed up for that kind of treatment. ABC should never have been allowed to sell that loan.
Same goes for mortgage loans. You should be able to pick your lender, and if they want to sell your loan to someone else, you should have the option to refuse. If they don't like this, they can just not loan money, or just hang onto the loans they have. They have no need to sell their loans.
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Since the 30s (Score:2)
One has not been able to "choose" the lender since the great depression. Banks face 2 issues. The first is that they need to be solvent. i.e. more assets then loans. The 2nd is liquidly. When banks run into problems they need to sell assets – such as your home loan. Here’s why.
I am going to use the movie “It’s a Wonder Life”. Lots of real work banking issues in that film. George Bailey, owner of a small bank, has a problem. He has a lot of short term loans (i.e. customer saving
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Simple: better customer service. BofA's customer service is probably the worst in the industry. So yes, if your mortgage gets sold to BofA, your circumstances HAVE changed, as you're forced to use them and their crappy website to make your payments.
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"We're not being attacked, we just are totally incompetent and can't keep our site up under normal conditions"
I know someone who used to be a tech manager in their web hosting infrastructure, and that's pretty accurate.
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It actually might be.
The average consumer hears about technical difficulties and they just forget about it.
They hear denial of service attack they're suddenly thinking about a bad guy trying to steal their money.
Even the article summary lumps DDOS with hacking and malware.
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bitch slapped by the invisible hand... ouch!
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The reason you can see the hand in those comics is because it is the hand of fascism, not the invisible hand of the free market. America gave up any claim to having a free market when they implemented a centr
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Bank of America *does* have mirrored datacenters though (onlineEast and onlineWest). Something went tits up for sure.
BofA (Score:2)
Bastard operator from America?
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they should not used the lowest bid for outsourced (Score:2)
they should not used the lowest bid for outsourced team that redid the web page.
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they should not used the lowest bid for...
Lowest bidder = default action = "best practice"
Not saying it's right, just saying...and let's not act like every other corporation not in the media today doesn't do the exact same thing.
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Perhaps a bit of both. (Score:3)
Too incompetent to even know they are under attack.
Bank run? (Score:2)
Is a bank run technically a physical financial "denial of service attack"?
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Is a bank run technically a physical financial "denial of service attack"?
Careful. Next thing we know, it will be a crime to withdraw an amount from your bank account that threatens their operations.
After BOFH demands met BofA back online. (Score:3)
It's amazing what can be done with a tape vault, bulk eraser, and access to certain PIN numbers.
final straw (Score:2)
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I've had my BoA accounts for a long time as well, however that is because I started with an account with BayBank, who was bought by Bank Boston, who merged with Fleet, who was bought by Bank of America. Not my fault.
I haven't closed my account, but what I DID do was to move out everything but the minimum to avoid fees to a local credit union. So basically BoA is stuck with a tiny savings account, a credit card that never earns interest, and a checking account that never generates overdraft fees. I think
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I started with Newton-Waltham Savings Bank, who was bought by Baybank, etc. etc.. and my mortgage was with Countrywide.
I have friends who used to be Shawmut customers, and Sunbank customers in FL and KeyBank customers in NY.. they're all stuck with BoA now.
In the process of switching out of BoA myself now. Just have to find a place to land my rollover IRA. Thinking TD Ameritrade.
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No. They still have some of your money, and all it costs them is a few bytes' processing during their nightly updates.
Also, if you aren't using it, they can start charging dormant-account fees. They'll take out a few dollars a month, until you're below the fee limit, then it's a lot of dollars a month, until you're at $0, then they'll bill you for closing the account.
Banks are incredible fucking assholes when they think you are weak or inattentive.
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re-fi.
Rates have tanked in the past few months.
Right now you can probably get a good rate, and make money on it even if you roll the fees and points into the loan. Even better is if you can shorten the term by more than a few years and end up with roughly the same monthly payment. That's worth tens of thousands over the life of the loan.
Of course, there's a good chance it will end up being sold back to BofA, but you'll be paying less.
Credit unions FTW! (Score:2)
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If you have the credit union opportunity and can get away from BoA, you should consider doing it. They rip you off in fees. Price compare. It isn't hard to see the difference and changing a bank account isn't that difficult. You'll thank yourself in the long run.
The only way they hear you is if you leave.
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Get an account that rebates your ATM fees no matter whose ATM you use.
Search online for banks that do that.
Most brokerages have checking accounts that do it, as do almost all online-oriented banks like http://www.ally.com/ [ally.com]
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The problem is, these credit unions don't have very good ATM/physical locations, especially outside of where I live.
This shouldn't be a problem any more, now that debit cards are so common. 10 years ago, yes, it was a problem. These days, it's simple: anywhere you go inside the USA, you can pay using a debit card. At most places, you can also get "cash back" when you buy something else, so keep $20-50 in your wallet at all times, and if you go some place that doesn't take debit cards, use your cash and t
clueless, isolated, and paralyzed (Score:2)
that's today's Bank of America. portfolio full of toilet paper, execs who aren't canning the weasels who got them into the mess they're in or reporting them to the authorities, bigwigs giving themselves fat handshakes while stiffing the public, illegally foreclosing on houses they can't prove they loaned against, and can't fix a creaky website in a week.
oh, boy, time to run out and put all my money there, ya betcha, Sven.
Has this cost them $5 yet? (Score:2)
Per account, per month?
If not, I hope it gets worse.
If you're not a victim, you're incompetent (Score:3)
Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware
So, instead of a victim they're announcing to the world they're incompetent. I'm not at all certain that's an improvement. It was a choice between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea anyway. One way announces their security is sub-standard, the other that they just don't give a crap, which most of their customers already suspected anyway.
Financial pros speculate a different reason (Score:4, Interesting)
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They, and several other "too big to fail" banks are literally broke, and a run on them would make that all too obvious. While some people observe that their market cap (total stock value) is less than their "book value" we must remember that they got FASB rules suspended, and are marking all the bad mortgages on their books to a fantasy that they'll all pay off, rather than the market value which reflects their real worth. Honest books would show they have negative value.
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Since they are only propped up by loans from the fed, and FDIC doesn't have the money to back up the guarantees, the government sure ain't going to say anything that would cause a bank run, except for a couple of senators that have already mentioned in session only an idiot would still have an account with any of them. Do you suppose they know things they don't tell us? Count on it -- their own stock portfolios beat the best unprivileged managers every year, and by fat margins (double digit %) -- insider trading is legal for congressmen.
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Run, don't walk, if you're in one of the TBTF banks, find a local or a credit union. You've been warned. This won't end pretty. Some of them have bad paper exposure in the trillions, and it's not on the books because the rules were changed for the emergency. The bad stuff is still there....
Or we could look at some place not crazy (Score:3)
Some place that provides, well, data, like say Bankrate:
http://www.bankrate.com/rates/safe-sound/memorandums-memos.aspx?fedid=480228 [bankrate.com]
They seem to feel B of A is sound these days. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm not panicking because someone else is saying "The world is ending!"
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Or don't whine about the consequences of not knowing. I trade for a living and have dug into where the money went for the past 4 years -- even paid a forens
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Not to the media, they are one in the same even though we may know better.
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To the media guessing someone's yahoo password (hint, it's 'password') is hacking.
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Traffic is traffic. 6 days, to scale-up a financial infrastructure, is actually pretty good.
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It depends on how you do it. If you pwn 10,000 PCs with code you wrote and DDoS someone with your home made botnet, it is indeed a hack.
However, I doubt this is a hack. Their servers are probably overloaded from all the people logging on to cancel their accounts. Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge? Durbin was right; this isn't a DDoS, it's a Netflixing. Their CEO is incredibly out of touch (like most bankers). I hope they go out of business.
They should listen to the antitea protesters
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Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge?
Because you can't log in to the webserver to cancel? Perhaps the denial of service was internal and intentional.
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Because you can't log in to the webserver to cancel? Perhaps the denial of service was internal and intentional.
So get out of your "Command Centre" and up the stairs / Stenna lift, pop yourself in your obesity scooter, and trundle on over to the nearest branch with your personal details in hand, and pull all of your cash out of the bank there and then, in form of a Banker's Draft if you live in a less-than-safe neighbourhood. Instruct them to provide you with the details of your direct debits, then cancel all of them. Scoot on over to your local credit union or other financial institution and set up an account with y
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I'm curious what is this new decision to charge 5$ a month? is this per person? per account? per card? to use the site?
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Fascism, in MY country?
Re:All Anonymous and Lulzsec have to do now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does anyone still have an account with this company? It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with. There's also thousands of credit unions.
At this point, it seems like anyone that still has an account with BofA must be a moron.
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Morons are far more common than you want to believe. But, as the loss of customers of BofA is in the news, it will encourage other BofA customers to leave. There's a whole lot of "me too"-ism in those moronic masses.
But yeah, I haven't banked with a typical consumer bank for a very long time. I don't see the point. If I want to punish myself, I'll hire a hooker to beat me or something. Probably cheaper that way anyway.
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Morons are far more common than you want to believe. But, as the loss of customers of BofA is in the news, it will encourage other BofA customers to leave. There's a whole lot of "me too"-ism in those moronic masses.
Actually, me-too-ism can be an intelligent way to act, as long as you look at why others are doing something and then copy it if it's right for you. If you see a lot of people all doing the same thing, it can be very smart to look at why they're doing it, because there might be a very good reas
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Credit cards. Home mortgages, car loans,
None of these involve checking accounts with debit cards. And with home mortgages, you have zero control over who your lender is, but again, you won't be charged a $5/month fee for using a debit card if all you have with BofA is a home loan. You have to willingly go there and set up a checking account to get that kind of "service".
No one's forcing you to get a credit card or car loan with BofA.
payments to relatives who only have accounts on it etc
Huh? Please explai
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it's simple: you take it to your own bank, and deposit it. Your bank will get the money transferred from BofA for no fee.
You are presuming that the person holding the check written on BoA paper has a bank account.
This is the point of the argument against BoA (and the few other banks) that charge a fee for cashing their own financial instruments. The worst part of it is that the person with the BoA account generally doesnt even know that there is such a fee when they are writing their check.
The FDIC estimates that there are 10 million American households without bank accounts [fdic.gov] that are thus forced to pay a fee whenever th
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You are presuming that the person holding the check written on BoA paper has a bank account.
OK, unless you're an illegal alien or a homeless person, why wouldn't you have a bank account?
The FDIC estimates that there are 10 million American households without bank accounts
Yes, these are probably mostly illegals; they can't get bank accounts because they don't have valid SS numbers. We have tons of them here in Phoenix, and you can tell which neighborhoods have lots of them, because they also have lots of ch
Re:All Anonymous and Lulzsec have to do now... (Score:4, Informative)
OK, unless you're an illegal alien or a homeless person, why wouldn't you have a bank account?
Many people are poor and cannot maintain a balance, and as such must pay a monthly fee to have a bank account.. which they cannot afford to do, so they don't have bank accounts.
Yes, these are probably mostly illegals; they can't get bank accounts because they don't have valid SS numbers.
There is a reason that the check cashing business is so huge in inner cities, and its not because of all the Mexicans and Cubans in places like Boston, New Haven, and New York.
You are ignorant and lacking of even a small amount of common sense.
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Many people are poor and cannot maintain a balance, and as such must pay a monthly fee to have a bank account.. which they cannot afford to do, so they don't have bank accounts.
You don't need to maintain a balance to have a bank account. Maybe at shitty banks like BofA you do, but any credit union will happily give you a savings account (they call it a "share account") for free, and all you have to do is keep $5 in it (which is easy, they simply don't let you withdraw it below that level). Of course, this
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Oh, it gets even worse than that... try cashing a corporate or business check drawn against a BoA account. They will happily charge *you* $6 for the privilege, unless you have an account there yourself.
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What are you talking about? Maybe I'm missing something, but hasn't it been for the last 100+ years that if you take a check (from a different bank), to your bank and deposit it in your account, there's no fee for this service? Of course, you have to wait a few days for the check to clear, and if it's a really big check your bank will notify the IRS so you better not try to hide it on your tax returns, but otherwise there shouldn't be a fee.
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I think one commentator said that the protest crowed were the most overeducated underemployed protesters she had ever meet.
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A typo is a mistaken letter, typed on accident that may or may not change the meaning of the intended word.
This is just the wrong word used.
Traffic of people moving accounts out (Score:3, Insightful)
The real issue is traffic, the article leads me to believe that the back end data is getting crushed by old records which don't usually get instantiated. They try to downplay it, but the real problem is the mass exodus. I bet the many old customers are going back though old statements and printing them in advance of a transfer. I've developed statements systems for another bank, they don't behave well when too many people rip through all of their old statements at once. There usually are even firewalls
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Even worse, those six days are right at the beginning of the month, when many folks pay rent, bills, etc.
That has got to suck.
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Didn't suck at all, in fact until this article I had no idea they were having problems. Several first of the month billpay transactions worked just fine.
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Well, you have to figure what they could say...
"We've been down for a week, because ...."
1) "... because hackers took control of most of the network."
2) "... because a paramilitary group seized control of our datacenters."
3) "... because we don't want our customers retrieving the records before they leave over the $5/transaction fee"
4) "... because the IT people have been real busy fixing it. So busy in fact, that we