About two years ago I took out a secured small business loan with BB&T. Since then my life has become a never ending battle as BB&T has made every attempt to make it impossible to pay off my $60,000 loan.
Their main means of accomplishing this was through my business banking account and the merchant services that they offer and an equity line put in place to protect my checking account. Countless times BB&T withheld credit transactions for over a week only to wipe my account out during that time.
Over time they wiped out my equity line with an endless stream of fees and unjustified charges. In my merchant agreement Visa and Mastercard were to be deposited within 48 hours. By the time money would be deposited into my account BB&T would have hit me with every fee imaginable.
Example, I leased my credit card machine through BB&T and payments were automtically taken out of my account. On numerous occasions I was debited 3 of 4 times in one month for the same payment. Each complaint I filed was answered with an answere to the effect of "I would look into it but I know you are wrong so we will not in any way refund you payment or fee."
When I would bring up the withholding of funds they would tell me to call merchant services only to find out that BB&T does not handle merchant services and they are under no obligation to inform who does handle their merchant services.
Finally after months of fighting and tens of thousands of dollars I closed all of my accounts with BB&T. About 6 months later I get a call from a collection agency. Turns out that BB&T under the disguise of Total Systems had been hitting my closed account with $5 fees. Being the account closed there was $0 balance. Since there was no balence a $28 dollar fee was added. Then BB&T would go into a termed out line of equity and take those amounts out of what I was paying back. Remember the loan and the checking account had been closed to transactions for close to 6 months.
The bank representative Geoffrey Terrio(the only person ata BB&T that has been at least somewhat stright with me) said,"Basically you can't close this checking account because every time someone charges the account the closing cycle starts all over again. When I asked who was charging my account he said "I don't know it just says TSYS on your acoount." "who's that?" I asked. After two and a half weeks of banging my head against the wall I finally was told that TSYS was in fact the company that does processing for BB&T.
May I remind you that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
After all of this my business is absolutely ruined. My financial situation is in utter chaos and not one person at BB&T will give me a straight answere. I have heard of a possible class action suite against BB&T. If anyone has heard of this suit or is interested in starting one please contact me at
CLICK here to see why we deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report..
Also predatory lending may come into play. The property I secured the loan with is worth close to 6 times the amount of the loan. I can't help but believe that BB&T has made every attempt to take that property. The sad thing is that if I had a million dollars in cash I still could not pay off those loans totaling $70,000.
Let me here from you
Cliff
Atlanta, Georgia
U.S.A.
