forget about the racist angle, that won't fly. i'm sure the reasons for your account closure was documented well beforehand. anyway, since it was a fraud notation on your acct and u had to deal with the fraud department, couple that with what the last csr said regarding convenience checks, it's pretty clear to me why they closed your acct. this is what fwf'ers have been dreading.

there have clearly been people before u that have done larger AOR related transactions but maybe there has been a change in policy? let's not forget the recent sub-prime mortgage troubles. all the big banks have huge exposure to it. i don't believe boa has revealed yet the full impact on their balance sheet yet. citi just said they would be writing off about $10 billion.

perhaps banks are taking a hard look at ALL their exposure. the next big thing is all the unsecured debt from credit cards. this may be a the start of the end of all the wasy credit we've all been accustomed to. i don't blame them if they decide it's not prudent to extend $500k in lines to some college kid who claims his household income is $200k. perhaps they are going to go thru every acct and look at how much credit is available on credit reports and compare that to some income ratio, who knows?

I do not want to draw attention to my problem, in fact I don't really want to talk about it at all especially in someone else's thread.

I look pretty white and I have very German sounding name.

Anyway the Fidelity "risk management" group shut me down in a very similar manner to the OP. The best (most absurd) part is I did not have margin so I didn't see how I was much of a risk. They were very rude and refused to talk to me about. All my accounts were closed permanently.

I have no reason to doubt a racist remark was made by an individual to the OP. But it really pisses me off when something bad happens to a minority they hide behind cries of racism. The decision was made well in advance of the slur, was likely in part automated and almost definitely was made by someone other than the one who made the remark.

Again I will not talk about my issue again in this thread. PM me if you really have to know more.

I'm just saying I'm not going to a couple dozen websites saying my accounts were closed because of my ethnicity. I could be wrong but on a % basis there are probably more ethnic Hispanics, particularly in my SoCal region, then there are ethnic Germans but no one wants to give me minority rights.

For the record, in the future you can always ask initially if the call is being recorded, and then ask for an identifying piece of information of the person on the phone (extension, last name, etc) before you go into your situation. You may then have an avenue to have the phone representative disciplined or identified for terrible (or good if you wish to ship a compliment) service using the date, time, and person you spoke with.

SUCKISSTAPLES said:Newsflash - just bc someone utters a racist statement doesnt mean aything.

Unless the fraud investigator who made a racial statement during dicussions with OP was the same one who made the account closure decisions, this has nothing to do with why this action was taken.I'll answer, in case your comment is an oblique reply to my posts. I earlier said that I don't think the slur has anything to do with the account closing. I am encouraging OP to consider racial harassment charges because I think he has a case /*unrelated*/ to his account problems.

I certainly might be wrong, and IANAL of any type or persuasion. A short telephone call to the right kind of lawyer however, may be informative and useful. Heck, it may even be profitable. Slamming a racist *and* a bank is double dipping at its best.

theficus said:I'm Muslim and I was born in the Middle East. One of my parents is white and I grew up speaking English, so nobody can tell my race or religion unless they know my name. The CSR pretty much called me a terrorist.sounds like your name ended up on some type of Treasury Department watch list. unfortunately in the Muslim world, as in China, certain name/surname combinations are very common/repetitive.

I have an immigration lawyer friend who is representing a Syrian family, all of whom were granted asylum... except for the son. Let's say that his name is Osman al-Tabrini. The name Osman al-Tabrini appears on a DHS watch list as an undesirable alien... so the family is fighting his deportation. One problem... this Osman al-Tabrini is seven years old and knows more about Pokemon than he knows about Jihad. He was just born with the wrong name. Heck even Ted Kennedy had problems with a similar name showing up on a do-not-fly list.

Ficus, go to this website:

http://www.treasury.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/index.shtml

And make sure that a reasonable version of your name isn't one it. There is at least a small possibility that a good match to your name appears on the OFAC list, and that's why BofA is closing the accounts. However, if it were the reason, then I would suspect that they either wouldn't tell you ANYTHING about the closure.

And I'd recommend a letter to the office of BofA's CEO, carefully laying out two points:

1) The closure of accounts being bogus
2) The unprofessionalism of the fraud department.

rnj1975 said:OP, first you said this (on page 2 of the thread):

EDIT: Before anyone asks, yes, I'm a US citizen (natural born) and yes, I provided Bank of America with entirely accurate personal information.

And then you said this (on page 8 of the thread):

I'm Muslim and I was born in the Middle East. One of my parents is white and I grew up speaking English, so nobody can tell my race or religion unless they know my name. The CSR pretty much called me a terrorist.

Am I missing something?

One of the parents must be an US citizen therefore OP was born a US citizen.

I read pages 1-3 and here is what I would suggest, sorry if it is covered before:

1. the high profile/high risk option: go through legal route. A competent lawyer can establish the damage the bank has caused you in closing all of your accounts without notices. Plus there is the racial slur incident.

2. the low profile/less time consuming option: write a complaint to the office of the comptroller of the currency. They have a website and I am almost certain they have an online complaint form.

Call Clark Howard. He loves this kind of stuff and his team is very willing to listen to a case. He also dislikes BOA as it is. Just make sure your story adds up before going public.

Donedealzz said:. At times its best to stand your ground, and some times it best to walk away.we have a winner

Your account was probably flagged for money laundering, which the bank will have nothing to do with if they even suspect something. and by you making a large deposit then transferring funds to outside instutitions is a huge red flad. All calls to customer service are now recorded ( at least the center i was at) as of Jan 07.

-former employee.