Branch Banking & Trust Company - BB&T Bank Nancy Griffin Deducted money from my account for an account I had with my son in 2004. I received no phone call, letter or any other contact from BB&T telling me they were taking the money out of my account. Internet

The reason they don't contact you first is simple - had they done that, you'd have withdrawn all the money you had.

If you have a joint account that your son is on with you, in the eyes of the bank and the law, it's his account.  It's not up to them to decide whose money is what.

It's not fun, but it's not illegal.  Money was owed and it was collected from your son.  The fact that you're also on the account is unfortunate, but the bank sees that as a second account your son has that they can collect rightfully owed money from.

It's a risk you take when going joint on an account with someone.

It can be very frustrating when something like this happens. Especially when you do not consider it "your" account. This happens often with a parent that tries to help an adult child. The adult child normally wants to keep their personal affairs under wraps if they are struggling financially. He probably thought he would never have face this specific issue, since 5 years passed. Unfortunately these situations are not swept under the rug.

Talk to your son about repaying you, and helping you with your mortgage. You said you got that to help them. At your age, he should be doing all he can to help you. 

Essentially, the bank acted on the situation by using the guidelines they have set. We are all warned/ informed of the stipulations and consequences of not meeting our financial obligations with the institution when we make an agreement. These days we even get that at the doctor's office! Look at it this way. If you loaned me $200, and I said I would pay you in monthly installments, but I stopped halfway through, what would you do? What if you loaned funds to hundreds of thousands of people and half of them were not paying you back? Would you exercise your right to recover funds, or would you be a sitting duck? I don't think they would have taken your money, if they had never tried to contact a responsible party. Once the account goes so far past due they send letters out.

In your defense, it is in the "fine print." But normally the branch member is so eager to set up an account, and move to next client without explaining everything in detail, so they can meet goals that are set for them. From now on I would read everything closely, and I definitely not co-sign for other people. No matter who it is.

In response to your rebuttal of my report I'm asking you if it was too late to file a lawsuit to get this money then why is it not too late to take my money in the way that you did take it.  Even co-signers should have some rights which you gave me none.  When I paid the +$7,000 to BB&T for the credit card and other costs this amount of money should have been included with that transaction.  But even beside the point what is really bad is how you went about doing this to me.  I think that falls under the "sneaky" category.  Since you took the money without any type of notification or explanation to me makes me think that my money is no longer safe with BB&T and that you no longer deserve my trust in this institution.

Unfortunately this is not illegal.  What happened is that they used the "Right to Offset" to withdraw the money.  This basically allows a bank to withdraw funds from one account to "offset" a delinquency in another account at the same bank.

There is a business reason behind it.  As a bank does not want to have a person delinquent for them for a certain amount of money, when they have more than enough money in their bank in another account to cover the delinquency amount.  Unfortunately in cases like yours, you do everything you can to manage your account.  But because of someone else you run into this issue.  The other bad part is that in most cases this the debt is beyond the legal statute of limitations which means if they attempted to file suit they would not prevail because too much time has elapsed.

Now, you will find just about every Bank and Credit Union has this same clause, and just reinforces the point that you must read and understand the terms when you open up any account.  I would suggest that you talk to your Son and Daughter in Law to reimburse you the money as they are really the ones who caused the problem.