Greendot THEY ARE STEALING MONEY FROM PEOPLE AND NOT ALLOWING ACCESS TO MONEY THAT IS DEPOSITED Springfield Missouri

Go figure.

Looks to me as though Greendot.com packed up or switched gears.

I would guess that the problem with the direct deposit not going through is that they are no longer in business.

I would suggest that anyone with any type of direct or autopay deposit to a greendot credit card stop any such payments immediately.

I had a direct deposit going to my Greendot card for about ten weeks with no problem. All of a sudden starting with the first pay period of 2008, my deposit was rejected. I have a special perspective; I worked for two years at another bank's call center so I know something about how to work the call center maze.

I wound my way through the automated phone system to the option to speak with a person. This took more than half an hour -- it's hiding as Option 6, after the pleasant offer to return to the previous menu. Keep listening, you'll find it.

If you have trouble understanding an operator, ask for a supervisor. Be nice; it isn't easy on the operator's side either.

If the operator gives you an answer that's obviously nonsense or you don't understand the answer, ask for a supervisor.

If the operator keeps trying to take back ownership of the call, remain nice but be firm. Say clearly that you have asked to speak with a supervisor, you don't want to speak any more with the operator, please put you through to the supervisor, you will wait. Most call centers penalize first-line operators for not taking ownership of calls and brushing people off to supervisors. They also penalize the operators for "extended" call times, even though the operator has no way to control the complexity of the calls that come in. That was the single reason why I left my call center job (and another $5 per hour at my new job).

In my case, neither the operator nor the supervisor could tell me anything more than the deposit had been rejected. Why this had happened after many weeks of success, they couldn't say. They also could not confirm that the ADA and account numbers were correct -- for security reasons that information is not available to them. Print off and keep your original sign-up sheet!

I remained calm and repeatedly reminded the supervisor that my interest was as much to identify the problem as to get my money back. I knew it would come back, it just would take a few days.

Eventually a supervisor called me back (I'm told this almost never happens) to tell me she was very sorry but they had not been able to determine exactly why the deposit had been rejected. She offered to refund my monthly transaction fee. Too bad for me that the delay in getting access to my funds meant that I had to spend $26 at Western Union Quick Collect instead of $10 to pay two bills over the phone using the Greendot card, but what the heck.

My payroll department got the money back into their account with no indication of where it should go and to whom it should be returned. Yikes, more delay before I could get my replacement check, but I did eventually get it.

I reduced the amount of my direct deposit from $300 to $50 to test the system. This would be an inconvenience but not the disaster that the first rejection had been.

It wasn't in my account by Monday morning (it's supposed to be there on Thursday). I called Greendot. The first operator (very clearly native English speaking) said it had not been rejected, it had never been received and I should check with my payroll department. I asked immediately to speak to a supervisor because this was obviously (to me) a nonsense answer designed to get me off the line quickly.

I had to wait about ten minutes for a supervisor (not 40 minutes like the previous week) -- thank goodness I could keep working while I waited. She confirmed that the first operator's answer was incorrect; the deposit had again been rejected for "credit entry refused".

From my previous banking experience I knew to ask her to translate that reason into English for me. She had to put me on hold to answer it. It meant that the "transaction code" coming from my payroll bank was incorrect. I had to ask her to translate "transaction code". It means the code that tells the receiving bank's computer if this amount is a credit, a debit, or a pre-note (whatever _that_ is).

Okay. Although my payroll person was still swearing that nothing had changed in our system, maybe something changed at the bank level -- possibly at the start of the new calendar year. Stranger things have happened.

I could not get her to wrap around this idea to follow through with my employer's bank and she was getting agitated about how this was disrupting her workday. This of course is not Greendot's problem. It's also completely still possible that something happened on Greendot's side.

So I'm going to the next troubleshooting level -- cancelling this direct deposit, letting the card sit for a week or two without any deposits, then trying a new direct deposit with a small amount. And I think from now on I'll just use it like a little convenience account and not rely on it to work large amounts of money. I can get money orders at the grocery store (although those can have their own disaster stories).

The paranoid side of my brain says that it isn't in Greendot's interest for free direct deposits to work when they can collect $4.95 for every manual reload. But Mark Twain or somebody said we should not suspect intrigue when incompetence can be an adequate explanation (or words to that effect).

I have tried to clearly address my concern to Greendot that if the direct deposit worked okay for ten weeks and then suddenly was rejected with no reason for that rejection provided back to my payroll bank (and no audit path back to which account it should go back to), that's a big problem with their system and it deserves a very thorough investigation on their side. I'm a professional technical writer -- I'm usually pretty good at explaining complicated things at an understandable level. But they are locked into the simple explanation that my payer (employer) must have somehow changed something so that the transaction (type) code is not recognized by the receiving bank.

They were very nice and gave much more direct answers at my first call after I mentioned my willingness to send written complaints to the Consumer Protection Board and the Attorneys General of New York, Georgia, and California.

BTW, it took a lot of arm-twisting to get their home bank and home office info out of them on the phone and they never did give me a direct address or phone number for either one. This information is now available at their home page, I notice.

I'm not a Greendot employee, just a customer who had a problem who also has a few insights about how to work successfully with a call center. To be fair to Greendot, we consumers have to also do our part -- keep our records, stay calm, and work to actually solve problems instead of just beating up the call center people when we feel frustrated by system problems.