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Monday March 22, 05:17
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Washington Mutual Debit Cardholders Hit By Glitch
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Up to 30,000 customers of Washington Mutual had problems with their debit cards last Sunday, when a software glitch rejected transactions in progress, and, in some cases, charged the payments anyway. During the five-hour outage, debit card transactions on Washington Mutual cards were mistakenly denied at the point of sale, but funds were still withdrawn from customers accounts. Over the weekend, many customers were unable to use their debit cards, and the bank admitted that in many cases, customers might have assumed that their accounts had not been debited, and resorted to another form of payment.
Once Washington Mutual discovered the corrupted file, which affected debit cardholders in California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, New Jersey and New York, the bank began to reverse the affected transactions and expected to finish this process by last Monday. All other weekend transactions were put on hold to prevent bank accounts being overdrawn, but customers were angry at the inconvenience. Washington Mutual has previously had similar problems, spokesman, Tim McGarry, conceded, while reiterating the banks efforts to avoid a repetition of such incidents in future.
Under US federal laws, banks have to reimburse customers within 10 days if an electronic payment hits a speed bump, with Gail Hillebrand, senior attorney at the Consumer Unions west coast office, confirming that problems with a debit card are more easily resolved than with a credit card. Customers at the bank were inconvenienced in several ways by the glitch, with those being out of town, for instance, unable to access their accounts, or having payments refused at the point of sale.
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