Wells Fargo Bank NA will not honor stop payment, says it is never gauranteed even though they charged me Tempe Arizona

I believe a phone stop payment is good for 2 weeks. If you need it for longer than that, you need to fill out paperwork. Then the stop payment should be good for 6 months.

It sounds to me like you had ordered the stop payment in time.

It could very well be that the person you talked to on the phone didn't put the stop payment in the computer. Hard to say. I no longer do business with Wells Fargo for similar reasons.

Good luck.

Although it was with Citizen's. I place a stop payment on 2 checks over the phone with them. It was for a rental property I cancelled because the owner lied about it... but anyway, I told the owner of the property that I am NOT renting his house, and that I had stopped payment on the 2 deposit checks. ($2000 and $1700).

He went to the bank and deposited them anyway. Citizens PAID the checks. I called them, and they tried to tell me the same thing. After many threats of reporting them to every d**n initial I could think of, they did reverse the charges back to the guy's bank, and returned my money. I immediately closed the account, just in case they changed their minds.

So, be persistent. What they did was WRONG. However, if you had another $500.00 check pending, maybe they stopped payment on the wrong one?

Was the stop payment verbal or writen?

I am not sure how WF handles stop payments, but with the bank I do business with the stop payment is not enforced until the bank receives it in a writen form. Meaning I can call them to request a stop payment, the bank sends me the forms to sign in the mail and when the bank receives them the stop payment becomes enforcable (up to six months I think). If it needs to be done in a timely fasion, I would have to go to a bank branch to fill out and file the forms.

Perhaps you should have contacted the party the check was writen to and tell them not to cash it.