My bank's new 'smart' bill pay sent my rent to the wrong place for three months straight

I set up auto-pay for my apartment through my bank's online system, which has this new feature that's supposed to find and verify payees automatically. Well, it pulled up the wrong property management company with a similar name. I didn't catch it because the confirmation screen just showed the name, not the address. $2,400 of my rent money just vanished into some random company's account over three months. My landlord was not happy, and getting the money back was a nightmare of calls and forms. The bank finally fixed it, but it took six weeks. Has anyone else had their bill pay go completely rogue like this? How do you double-check those auto-fill details?

3 comments

3 Comments

jake_owens19d ago

Man, that is a total nightmare. I read an article last week about how these auto-fill systems can pull data from weird, outdated public records. Did you ever get a late fee from your landlord? I would be LIVID. It feels like the bank should have a better check in place, like showing the full address before the money leaves. I always take a screenshot of the final confirm page now, just in case.

zara_king19d ago

Yeah, I started typing in the first line of my old address and it auto-filled the whole thing... from like 2018. The system just grabbed it from some old public database. I had to call the bank and my landlord, and it still took three days to reverse. Now I manually type every single character, no auto-fill at all. It's slower, but at least the money goes to the right place.

danielhenderson18d ago

That sounds like a huge hassle. What did the bank say when you called? Did they act like it was a common problem or were they surprised? I wonder if they have a way to clear out that old saved data on their end so it doesn't keep happening to people.