I am SO glad I am no longer a Fleet/Bank of America customer:
Bank of America Corp. says its recent conversion of FleetBoston accounts to its computer network went smoothly, but don’t tell that to Mark Levy, who accidentally got online access to about $90,000 of other people’s money.
When Levy went to the bank’s website to check his accounts, the freelance writer from Brookline said, he also had access to several accounts that weren’t his. If he were criminally inclined, he said, he could have emptied those accounts.
Bank spokesman Ernesto Anguilla said that what happened was an isolated incident caused by “human error” and “unrelated to the conversion.” While Levy got access to about 10 accounts, it appears that they belonged to two customers, Anguilla said.
There was no way those customers could have suffered financial losses, Anguilla said, because all Bank of America customers “would be fully reimbursed by the bank for any unauthorized transactions.”
Okay, perhaps after a LOT of wrangling on the phone and in person with Bank of America staff, a person might have been reimbursed for their troubles as a result of the error if it did cause them to lose money. However, that doesn’t make up for the fact that their privacy was violated, someone else now knows their account numbers and how money is in those accounts and how well off (or maybe not so well off) they are, AND there’s still the minimum half hour of OMGWTF!-ness that would have ensued when the victim logged into their accounts and saw that their entire financial portfolio had been cleaned out. the immediate response to being robbed in this fashion isn’t exactly a calm and nonchalant “oh, the bank will reimburse me.”
