Washington Mutual Bank - money taken from escrow account

Complaints.com received the following consumer message on September 30, 2002:

From:

RE: Washington Mutual Bank - money taken from escrow account

While browsing the internet in January 2002 I came upon a site that allowed me to view details about my home at the county auditors site. When I located my home, it showed that my county taxes had not been paid for 1999 and that my home was about to go into foreclosure for non payment of taxes. I am on Washington Mutuals own equity accelerator program and have been since 1997. For anybody unfamiliar with this program, Washington mutual takes their payment directly from my account biweekly.

This means that there is no chance that I could have ever missed or been late on a payment in 1999. After months of trying to get this issue solved and numerous calls to Washington Mutual, Washington Mutual finally paid the taxes for 1999 in March 2002. This was after my property was officially in foreclosure. The county was happy, they received their taxes, interest and penalties.

Then, in April 2002, Washington Mutual subtracted 1200 dollars from my escrow account and sent me a letter informing me that due to the deficit in my escrow account, they would be increasing my monthly mortgage payment. I quickly contacted WAMU via 800 number and informed them that I had paid the taxes with my monthly payments back in 1999 and what they did with the money after that is their problem, not mine.

In the mean time, they were charging me extra monthly mortgage payments and withdrawing them directly from my checking account. In July 2002 after many more phone calls and the promise on two separate occasions that they needed 30 days to investigate the paper trail, I was informed that they had found checks issued for my taxes back in 1999 and they needed to find out if the checks had been cashed.

I was informed that this indeed showed that I had paid everything that I was required to pay and that this was an issue between them and my county auditors department, thus leaving me out of this loop. In September 2002, I received a letter from WAMU that my escrow account was in deficit and that my monthly payment would increase. After reading the letter and looking at the figures, I saw that WAMU had never put the 1200 dollars back into my account that they removed in error.

I contacted WAMU and spend hours on the phone rehashing the same things I had worked through months ago as they acted like they were unaware of any of it. Several hours of phone conversation later, they noticed a notation on their computer stating that these checks had been issued for my taxes and that this was under investigation to determine if these checks had been cashed(this is seven months after we began the process and eight months after finding my house in foreclosure). I asked them to put a stop on the withdraw of the extra escrow payment and they told me they had no power to do that.

A couple of days later, I was informed of a number that I could call to discuss the extra withdrawal amount. I contacted the equity accelerator department of WAMU and they told me that they would stop the extra payment during the investigation of weather the checks for my taxes in 1999 had been cashed. Two days later, a withdrawal was taken from my account from WAMU for the extra escrow amount.

I'm sick of this!

Washington mutual needs to put the 1200 dollars back into my escrow account and deal with the error without my involvement. If the checks cashed or did not cash is not my problem, it is their problem, this is why I have an escrow account. My guess is that there was an error at the county side and the checks were cashed but not credited to my tax account.

Still, this has nothing to do with me, except in an indirect manor and I should not be in this loop. If WAMU is incapable of properly doing escrow, they should not offer to do it. I find WAMU to be a typical HUGE multi departmental corporation that has no idea from department to department what anybody else is doing. They claim to be some sort of hometown bank and they are totally deceiving the public with that image.

Their inability to service the accounts they have and their willingness to subtract funds from their customers first and question their own banking practices second is far more than a little irritating. It's odd, I really liked this company in 1997 but I don't think they are the same company anymore.

Comment On This

I too was a customer of Washington Mutual with a checking acc't. During the escrow about 1 year ago, they "LOST" over $40,000 of my money for 2 weeks, and this year I wrote a check for $2500.00 and they put it through as $25,000 and so came up short in my acc't..how can they read an extra zero on a written check? They also closed an escrow forcing me to take a Line of Credit I did NOT ask for at all. There was never any apology, and they felt indignant when I asked them to correct their mistakes - I finally had to close my account. I'm always a responsible person but I find their staff if not arrogant, then poorly trained at best. Sorry for your problems, but you're NOT ALONE! Their rates of escrow, mortgage and line of credits are NOT good, and they make so many mistakes (besides what I listed above) which they don't correct or at best, correct with NO apology losing you money - as if they own your money, not you. FED UP with WAMU!! Stay away from Wash. Mutual, their advertising is false.