I check all my financial accounts through Yodlee pretty compulsively consistently, and tonight I noticed an odd $2 charge from "Phone Banker Call 01/30". Now, $2 is not a big deal, but not having any idea what the charge is does bother me, so I called up my bank to see if they had any more information on what the charge was.
The customer service rep told me that it was a fee from Wells Fargo itself, for speaking to a banker about something that the automated phone system could have handled. He listed off the types of services that count, and all of those things I do exclusively online. I hate the phone and avoid it wherever possible; simple things that the automated phone system could handle, I would just do online myself. I said as much, and added that I couldn't remember making any such phone call.
He very politely, and without any prompting on my part, offered to refund the fee. FTW! It's only $2, but I don't recall doing the thing they say they charged me for, so I'll have the fee refunded, thankyouverymuch. :)
If I had made such a phone call, I think I would have remembered if the banker had mentioned at the end, "Oh, and by the way, this call just cost you $2 in fees. Have a nice day." I don't recall ever knowing that such fees were possible. I assume that somewhere buried in the fine print of the Terms of Service it's been updated to say this fee exists, but overall it seems pretty shady and lame to me.
Some quick Googling shows that this fee isn't new after all. Blogger Toby Getsch wrote about this in 2006, and the Oakland Tribune in 2003. If Wells Fargo ATMs weren't everywhere, I would have dropped them several years ago... *sigh*
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