Posted on 12/15/2013 6:51:34 AM PST by Sub-Driver
Edited on 12/15/2013 9:40:57 AM PST by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
Shannon Bruner of Indianola logged on to her checking account Monday morning, and found she was almost 800 dollars in the negative.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Never, ever give anyone or any organization connected with the US government electronic access to any account you don’t want to be capriciously robbed because some frigging bureaucrat can’t read or doesn’t care.
Scary, yes, but the answer here is to NEVER give the government the authority to do automatic bank drafts from your account, not when you pay taxes or at any other time.
Now, if you are *employed* by the government, you may not have a choice if you use Direct Deposit (you give your employer the right to take money out as much as you authorize them to put money in) but I have rarely given other entities the right to automatically withdraw from my checking account. And I refuse to own a “debit card” for the same reason.
I do have some autopay bills but they are to charge to my credit card, not take money out of checking.
I wonder if someone hacked their invoice, and took the funds before the government did — hackers would know the exact amount, to avoid it looking like a suspicious transaction.
Bad enough if the government took it; horrifying if it was a hack . . .
no . . . horrifying that the government would take it . . .
If this were done by a business, the CEO would be in front of a congressional committee being ripped to shreds.
When the government does it, it’s screw you taxpayer! You have no recourse. Now the government has your complete financial information.
Lots of luck trusting an organization that sics the IRS on its enemies and records all phone calls.
If your insurance has been cancelled.
DO NOT GO TO THE EXCHANGE, and hand hem your information./
First it is not secure and second you cannot trust this government any more than you could Ali Baba and the forty thieves.
Go to a private insurer and deal with the Company not thru Obama.
Yes you should be setting up a separate checking account just for the insurance. That way you just put the correct amount in every month and thats all they get. I would never give the govt or anybody the access to my primary checking acct.
There's no way in hell I would ever allow an outside company to get access to my bank account information for regular bill payments.
They don’t mail checks anymore. When you apply for SS you have to give them an account to direct deposit. Maybe your friend forgot.
Why should *I* have to jump through hoops and maintain another account because our government is chock full of morons?
F U B O!
I’m not arguing with you about that. I totally agree but it appears the police state is here and you will be required to allow the govt to automatically deduct the healthcare payment. Which means they can deduct anything else like fines or penalties also.
I opened accounts at a new bank. I added a separate account for my debit card, so I could transfer in exactly what I wanted to pay out with the card. The girl who was setting up the accounts kept insisting that I link the account with overdraft protection. I kept saying “no, I don’t want overdraft.” So she set it up with overdraft anyway, for my own good. I caught the “error”, and insisted that there be no overdraft. The manager was called over, and he insisted that I had to have overdraft in case someone charge more than I expected on my debit card (!). I looked at him, trying to non-verbally tell him he was an idiot, but he did not see. After a long and stubborn effort, I finally walked out with an account for my debit card that had no overdraft “protection”, but it took every bit of kindness I had to not explain to them how stupid they all were.
I can believe they know everyone’s bank account and other information. But how do they distinguish between all the “Joe Smiths” and “Abdul Mohammeds”?
It seems the smart thing to do would be to close that account IMMEDIATELY, although after reading Virgil’s post below yours, I’m not sure even that would work.
Bottom line: If your money is in the bank, it is no longer your money. It is not your money again until it is “in your hot little hand”.
Even back in the 1980s, when direct withdrawal became popular, unscrupulous companies discovered that banks trusted them implicitly, and far more than their depositors.
So these unscrupulous companies began to carry out legal bank theft. Even though account holders had not authorized automatic withdrawal, if companies requested money, within reason, usually under $500, from someone’s account, the banks would give it to them.
The customer would not discover this unauthorized withdrawal until their monthly statement arrived, unless they tried to make a cash withdrawal themselves that was greater than the amount of money in the account (usually rent). In either case, they would contact their bank to demand to know what had happened to their money.
The bank would tell them that the money was withdrawn by ‘X’ company, and this was not the bank’s problem, so if they wanted their money, they had to contact ‘X’ company.
As soon as an account holder contacted the unscrupulous company, it would apologize and refund the money to the bank, but not the month-long “float” that it had gained from the theft. This could make that company hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, nationwide, from tens of thousands of such thefts. And because they had returned the money, few states cared enough to do anything at all about the theft.
This hurt a lot of people who were suddenly unable to pay their bills, so lost their rental lease, or automobile, or other high end purchase because they could not make payments.
And things have gotten a LOT worse since then, with numerous banking regulations eliminated or changed to the advantage of the banks; the end of easy bankruptcy; the ability of the banks to freeze accounts, even ‘demand’ accounts, for as long as two weeks without further government permission. And the government decided that it would no longer mail checks to individuals, instead only send them electronically to banks.
Oh, and banks no longer pay any interest to their account holders at all.
So the bottom line is that by putting your money in a bank you risk all of it, are a sitting duck to commercial and government scoundrels, and you get *nothing* out of the deal.
To heck with banks.
That’s what I did years ago for a paypal account. I also use it for my insurance auto debit. On the first of the month I transfer the amount of the payment into the account. There is never over $10 in the account so no one will get much.
To protect your money...? ;-)
You don’t have to give permission. Before electronic access, they were able to steal from private accounts without notifying the owner just because they are the government. BTDT and still no apology for my life being on hold due to 6 months of 24/7 trying to correct THEIR mistake.
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