Lost & Found

Making a deposit at her bank last February, Danielle Sellers got a rude shock: $8,000 had vanished from her checking account. Stunned, she turned to the teller and demanded to know what had happened. h e culprit was an online payment to her cell phone carrier, Sprint. Instead of $79.12, she had been debited $7,912.

You can prevent mysterious bank account withdrawals by using a credit card (that you make sure to pay of in full each month). Doing so won’t save you from the occasional typo, but if you enter an errant amount, you’ll be disputing what you owe, rather than trying to get a refund for a payment already processed. h at’s a much stronger bargaining position.

Sellers swears she double-checked the amount before clicking “Send,” but Sprint wanted proof of the excessive payment and asked her to fax a bank statement. Days later, Sprint e-mailed her that it had closed the case. h at would have been just fine – except the company hadn’t refunded a penny.

Online banking is an Internet-age blessing when it works. But when things go wrong, it can be a curse. In Sellers’s case, two things went wrong. h e i rst, of course, was the missing decimal point. Typos happen, but they can be tricky to i x with online banking. But the process dragged on, which is the second thing that went wrong. After a case stalls for a certain period, customer-service computers are programmed to spit out a “case closed” letter.that was when Sellers got in touch with On Your Side. By the time Ron Burley from Consumer Reports called, the payment had hit Sprint’s books, and the company quickly sent a refund.

The best prevention is to double-check the i gures you enter. If you discover an error, call your credit union right away. Timing is crucial. Once a payment hits the clearinghouse, even the bank cannot undo it.

Ron Burley is the author of “Unscrewed: The Consumer’s Guide to Getting What You Paid For.”

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