Where, oh where, can my $$$ be?

December 31, 2005 9:25 AM

FatFingerFilter: Screwed up a bank form - how bad off am I?

So I have an account at brokerage A, and I noticed that they offer ACH transfers now. Great, thinks I, I'll fill that out and get $$$ faster into checking account at bank B. It takes a couple of tries and the form's a little funky, but I finally get it submitted and go on to make a trade.

Come settlement day, I check my bank account at B. No $$$. "hmm, I'll check tomorrow.". Now it's Saturday on a holiday weekend, no $$$ in the account. No indication of a problem at brokerage A, either. With creeping dread, I go check that form, and guess what? I transposed a digit on my bank account number when I filled it out! AUGH!

I know there's literally nothing I can do until the apparatus of Western finance comes back to work on Tuesday. So my questions, to anyone in the banking industry that has sympathy and a little time, are: 1) how screwed am I? Can the brokerage reverse the transfer and put it in the right account? Or is it totally my bad and I've given some random bank customer a very happy New Year? and 2) assuming it is correctable, how long is it likely to take to back it out and put the money in the right place?

posted by dragstroke to Work & Money (5 answers total)

Best answer: Pretty much guaranteed to be correctable. Note that if that arrived in someone else's account and they spent any of it, they have committed a crime.

I once had a little over $9000 appear in my bank account for a day, and then mysteriously disappear. I didn't spend any of it, and the bank never called to let me know that this had happened.

If I was you, I -would- call their phone numbers and see who you can speak to, or at least leave them a message. You need to get in their priority queue as soon as you can.
posted by Kickstart70 at 9:53 AM on December 31, 2005

what Kickstart said. He's right on the mark.
posted by j.p. Hung at 11:15 AM on December 31, 2005

I once got an account number wrong when doing an EFT between my checking account and my savings account (which are at different banks). When I called the destination bank, they said that the transfer had been refused, and that I could start over by making a new request. I did, and my second attempt succeeded normally.
posted by mbrubeck at 11:20 AM on December 31, 2005

(Both of my banks offer telephone service on Saturdays, and one of them does on Sundays too.)
posted by mbrubeck at 11:22 AM on December 31, 2005

It's absolutely correctable, but you may be without your money for 5 days or so.
posted by qslack at 2:16 PM on December 31, 2005