Bank of America Online Alerts

Bank of America Online Alerts

June 29, 2006

Bank of America advertises the ability to setup their Online Alert System to increase the security of your accounts. With proper setup. it is supposed to send you an e-mail alert when certain selected activities occur in your accounts. I setup my accounts using this Alert System, and it seemed to work

great. Then, for some reason, I did not get some alerts when I should have. I called their support line, and worked with the support person to verify everything was set up correctly, and it was. The activity history showed a reportable activity occurred, but an alert was not generated. It was not the case where it generated an alert, and for some reason it would not come into my mail account. The alert history showed the alert was never generated. I was given a case number, and they were supposed to work on it. The next day I got a call from a bank person that said they would not look into the problem because it states in their Online Terms and Agreement statement that Alerts may not always be sent. I suggested they could at least look into why the alert was never generated to see if it could be corrected. Again I was told about the statement in the Terms and Agreement document. End of

problem. I was led to believe this was a good security feature. Then I found out it may or may not work, and they have no interest in fixing it. It tried to escalate the problem to higher levels, from supervisor, to corporate customer service manager, to the bank CEO. Got no response. The bottom line is this: This well promoted Online Alert Feature is not reliable, and they have no intentions of fixing it. They cover this up by the statement in the Terms and Conditions Document, which is not easy to find. I suggested either they state up front in the normal alert setup windows it may not always work, fix the problem, or just remove it as a feature. Security in my accounts is important to me. If this is a known security issue and they do not care to fix it, what other things may not be reliable? This appears to be nothing but a sales gimmick.

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