Bank of America Gives Same Account Number to Two Customers

While Bank of America may have millions and millions of customers, one would think that having 10-digit account numbers would allow the bank to have billions of customers without duplicating a number. But this is BofA, who not only managed to have two customers with identical numbers for two years -- depositing $30,000 of Social Security payments into the wrong account during that time -- but who also shrugs it off by saying this "does happen occasionally."

The L.A. Times' David Lazarus has the story of an 88-year-old retiree who had banked with BofA for 60 years. Last December, his son and grandson began looking into the octogenarian's accounts when it became clear he could no longer handle day-to-day maintenance of his finances. They immediately noticed that he hadn't received a Social Security payment, which was to be direct-deposited to a BofA account, since March 2009.

So son and grandson went to the BofA branch, where they were told that grandpa and grandma's account numbers had been changed in 2009 because of unspecified suspicious activity. The bank said it had notified Social Security about the change and grandma's payments had been going through with no problem, but that wasn't the case for gramps.

"The bank manager said they could see on the screen that my grandfather's checks were going to a different account," the grandson tells the L.A. Times. "But they said there was nothing they could do about it."

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