Hi everyone,
I posted about this yesterday and didn't get too many responses, although luckily most of my financial issues have been resolved thanks to my mom's help.
A short version of what happened: a 3k+ charge showed as pending in my checking account from my old university (edit to add: I didn't recognize at first that it was from my university and thought it was a random fraud as it didn't explicitly state the university name in the ACH debit description, and I graduated in 2016). I filed a fraud claim and my bank is in the process of investigating and closing my checking account. I called the university student accounts division and they have no record of that charge amount anywhere in their records for the past 2 weeks. The charge just appeared in my pending transactions overnight, and looked EXACTLY the same (same name, same origination ID, even the exact same dollar amount) of the tuition payments I made in Oct/Sept of 2015. I never used autopay to pay tuition and manually entered my account and routing numbers for each of the two semesters I paid tuition via e-check in 2015. I never ever authorized that they store my account/routing number.
I'm wondering now about the repercussions of my account and routing number still being on the school's servers, and them debiting my checking account without any warning, authorization, nothing.
I've spoken to the student accounts manager, but it seems the school is on lockdown mode to limit their liability, and they sent me back a very generic response. Is there anything I can do? I'm wondering if there was a security breach on their side and while I will be protected as my checking account is being closed, other students may be at risk also. The debit would have been cleared if I hadn't called the fraud department as it apparently raised no red flags.
Edited to add: No one at the student accounts office is picking up the phone and I am not getting an email response either.
Second Edit: I've just had a long conversation with the school's account manager and someone from their account processing department in the treasury office, and they were actually very kind. Apparently this has happened to many, many students in the past week and they are working hard to track down the error and prevent it from happening again. They've also offered to pay for any fees or anything I'll incur due to having my checking account shut down which is very kind of them. It unfortunately won't help that I can't access $6k of my own money (the $4k in my frozen checking account and the $2k direct deposit that bounced today) for the next two weeks, but they are doing what they can. Special thanks to u/ReallyGene for letting me know that ACH blocks exist!!
Submitted August 03, 2018 at 01:15PM by Skedaddle120 https://ift.tt/2LNVkxY
