We have all been there. You are vacationing out of town and go to make a purchase at a store. Everything seems routine until your checking account or credit card stops working. The teller informs you of the issue and the only thing going through your head is "how can this be, I had plenty of money in my account the last time I checked!" It turns out you did not tell your bank that you were vacationing out of town, and the bank has flagged your purchase as fraud. Their algorithms noticed that most purchases you make are within a certain geographic area, so when you try to make a purchase far away from that location, the computer code suspects that someone has stolen your card information.
So, what happens next? Often, nothing. You call the bank's customer service hotline and have a hard time getting someone on the phone. Once you finally talk to someone on the phone, they confirm that there was suspicious activity on your account and as a result, the bank has frozen the funds in your account, and you no longer have access to them. The bank's customer service department is powerless to resolve your issue. You call again, same result.
The reality is, often times no one is wrong. The bank is appropriately taking steps to protect your money by monitoring for suspicious activity and freezing access to your funds when said activity is identified. You should be glad the bank is protecting your funds with such vigor. But at some point, you need the bank to realize that it was just you on vacation in a new location. You need the bank to unfreeze the funds. The problem is the bank needs assurances that if they unfreeze the funds and release them to you, they will not be liable for releasing the money to the wrong person and aiding a bad actor in stealing money from your account.
Often times the only solution in this situation is to retain and attorney and file a lawsuit against the bank. It sounds antagonistic. When most people hear the word lawsuit they think of an adversarial process where one party wins, and one party loses (and both parties spend a fortune on attorney's fees). The reality is, there are all types of lawsuits that are not antagonistic at all. This is one such lawsuit. By retaining an attorney and filing a simple declaratory judgement action you can resolvie the issues with the bank and secure the release of funds while also providing the bank with the assurances it needs that it will not be liable for releasing the funds.
If you have funds in a bank account that are currently frozen, contact Dean Law, PLC today for a free consultation.
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