10/20/2009

Dear Clark,

I love your show.  I had an issue recently which fortunately has been resolved, but It left me with several unanswered questions which I believe would be of interest to a broad number of your listeners.

Here is a brief recap of what happened:

My son, Chad, (age 28) his wife (8 months pregnant at the time) and my grandson (age 3) moved from Nashville to Hong Kong in August, 2009. They stayed in a hotel for a week while they looked for an apartment to rent.  Apartments are very expensive there – they needed about $10K US for the initial deposit, and first and last month’s rent. No problem. My son had more than enough money in his U.S. Account at Bank of America and he had opened an account with a bank in Hong Kong, called HSBC.

On August 19, 2009, Chad initiated a wire transfer from BofA to his bank in Hong Kong for $10K.  The transfer was supposed to go through in 3 business days.

What a disaster!  B of A claimed they sent the money. The bank in Hong Kong claimed they never got the money.

After a week had gone by, with dozens of international phone calls to BofA, we had no progress at all. 
BofA bounced him from one office to another. Noone could explain where the money had gone. 

I had to send him $10K out of my own pocket via Western Union, so that he could get into the apartment.  Fortunately I had the cash, but not every family would be so lucky!  Chad and his family could really have been in a crisis.

Imagine being so far from home…

·         You are running out of cash…

·         You are paying hotel rates which are eating at your savings

·         You are paying international calling rates to try to reach a bank which seldom answers the phone, and leaves you on hold for thirty minutes at a time.

·         Your bank has lost a $10,000 transaction and cannot explain where the money went, or how you can get it back.

We had the SWIFT codes and so other tracking information, but neither bank could figure it out. At one point they told us his money was in some retirement fund in Hong Kong. Then they told us it was stuck in the New York branch of HSBC.

BofA is a totally dysfunctional organization.  The support people would insist that we speak with a Branch Manager in Charleston. She would never answer her phone and was prohibited from returning international calls.  It turns out she had no role in resolving the problem.  The wire transfer office for BofA in California was equally useless.  Chad was about at his wits end, making endless phone calls at midnight his time to try to reach people at noon in the U.S.

I am not on Chad’s account, so Bof A was very reluctant to talk to me. But I am a pretty persuasive guy. I was at least able to get in touch with someone at BoFA who agreed to take ownership of the problem. 

Paula Roman, at BofA (Customer Solutions Department) became our point of contact.  She could at least call internationally, and use email to communicate between Chad and myself. I made first contact with her on September 2, 2009.

I am not saying this is “Cause-and-effect” but on September 23, 2009, I called Paula and left a carefully worded voice mail about..”what U.S. Governing body has oversight on international wire transfers…and I hate to see this move toward litigation.”

So when did we get the money back in Chad’s BofA account? On the afternoon of September 23^rd, we received an email saying the money had been re-deposited to Chad’s account on September 22^rd, 2009! Thirty-five days from the time of the original transfer!!!  Coincidence. Hmm.

So, with that long-winded story now told, here are the questions:

1) What is the safest way to transfer both small and large sums of money to someone in Hong Kong?

2) How can someone in a foreign land grant “power of attorney” to someone in the United States. (Chad wanted to grant me power of attorney for his account. B of A said he would have to appear in person in one of their branches and sign paperwork).

3) What governing body could/should we contact about an international wire transfer gone bad?

4) How should we proceed to recoup fees charged for the wire transfer, the Western Union transfer, and all of the phone calls we spent trying to resolve the problem?

Two other notes of interest:

a.      Trying to send $10,000 via Western Union was a story unto itself. We tried to do it on their website – no luck, because we had never used the service before. The dollar amount was too large. So we called them. They said they could do it “over the phone”, but then decided, “No we cannot do it over the phone.  They claimed I needed to take CASH to a Western Union location, and that the transaction would need to be split into two $5,000 chunks that needed to go to two different Western Union Offices.  B.S.  I was able to go to Redstone Federal Credit Union and have them do the Western Union transfer. We DID need to split the amount into two $5,000 transactions.  I was very worried about the prospect of my son walking around Kong Kong with $10,000 in cash, but we had no choice. Fortunately the Western Union transaction went flawlessly and quickly.

b.      I have recently received an email indicating that PayPal can be used to send funds internationally. I use PayPal all the time for eBay, but never thought of using it for such a purpose.

Thanks, Clark in advance for your attention and advice!

Sincerely,

Craig Lykins

CraigBLykins@hotmail.com

256-837-1689