Is Wells Fargo the Slimiest Bank in Existence or Does Everybody Do This?

[hrj]

I just got a sales call from a Wells Fargo representative (the company that holds my mortgage and credit card account). It was a heads-up about a great new personal insurance offer they're going to be sending me in the mail -- along with a $25 gas gift card no-strings-attached just for considering the offer. But in the middle of the spiel, I start twigging on this phrase he keeps mentioning about "calling to decline the offer" and I ask straight out, "What happens if your 60-day period to respond goes by and I don't call you to decline it?" Oh, he says, then they assume that I've accepted the offered insurance policy. And -- although I couldn't quite get him to say so in as many words -- they start charging my account for it. Oh, he assured me that if the 60 days passed and they started charging me I could tell them "oh silly me, I just utterly forgot to tell you not to sign me up for this" and they'd reverse it. Yeah, right. Like that makes it better.

So, oh my friends in finance and business, how can something like this actually be legal? How can a company -- even one with whom I have an existing business relationship -- create an "opt-out" type of contract for an insurance policy where I can be considered to have become a party to a contract without actually taking positive action to enter into the contract? (Note that I'm not asking whether it's moral or ethical -- we already know the answer to that.)

And is there any governmental agency I can complain to about this? I'm not feeling sufficiently gratified by having given the sales guy an enormous piece of my mind and requested him to take official note of my feedback. (I would like to note that no four-letter words escaped my mouth even when I was asking him how he managed to sleep at night after participating in as nasty a piece of work as this policy was.) I think I even managed to get him a little uncomfortable by the end of the call, although that's probably just my imagination.

Comments

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

It's legal, as Letitia said, since Opt-out is both in the phone call and somewhere on the policy they sent you. There may even be a note somewhere that says that using the gas card constitutes acceptance of the policy.

You can call the FCC. They are more likely to take bad business practices complaints of this sort. So will the Better Business Bureau. If they aren't the right place, they can tell you where to call.

If I read the regulations correctly, the FDIC will be sympathetic but can't actually do anything about that -- not only are they horrendously busy right now, but it's not actually in their domain. They may put a letter in the file.

You can also complain to the bank itself. Bank examiners will find things like this and note them in their reports, if I understand the process correctly (Letitia?).