“At first I thought they’d just cancel the credit card and it was kind of funny,” said Judy Cashner, who lives in Lincoln City. “But now it’s not funny.” A friend made her this shirt, which references a famous Monty Python comedy line.
Word of Judy Cashner’s death came as quite a shock to Judy Cashner.
The news came from her bank, Wells Fargo, in a letter last month. The Lincoln City woman was surprised to discover she had been dead since 2019.
“We are sorry for your loss and understand this is a difficult time for you,” Wells Fargo notified Cashner in the August 10 letter addressed to her estate. The letter told Cashner, 76, that credit card payments received after her passing would be applied to transactions made after her death.
“If this was not your intent,” the bank wrote, “please call us.”
Oh, it seemed like a big joke. The kind of computer-generated snafu that plagues modern life. But when Cashner called Wells Fargo to fix the situation, she got some bad news about her death.
In addition to notifying Cashner of her own passing, she said that Wells Fargo also had taken it upon itself to tell three credit reporting agencies that she had died. Cashner and her husband were in the process of refinancing their home so they could pay to replace a failing septic tank.
Suddenly, their lender said it didn’t have the information it needed to approve the loan.
“My income was not available,” Cashner said, “because I was deceased.”
That situation ultimately got resolved, but weeks later thousands of dollars in mysterious “non estate” charges nominally remain on Cashner’s credit card bill. And it’s still not clear how Wells Fargo got the notion that she had died or why it failed to verify that information before acting on it.
The bank declined to comment on the situation, citing Cashner’s privacy, but said it ordinarily requires a Social Security number and an official death certificate to establish that a customer has died.
After inquiries from The Oregonian/OregonLive this past week, Wells Fargo said it will investigate Cashner’s situation. She said the bank called her Thursday and promised to give her answers by Monday.
Wells Fargo is among the nation’s largest banks, and perhaps its most troubled. In February, the company agreed to pay $3 billion to settle civil and criminal investigations into its longstanding practice of opening unauthorized bank accounts for customers to meet sales goals. Wells Fargo has also faced penalties for requiring customers to buy car insurance they didn’t need and pay mortgage fees they didn’t owe.
Since Wells Fargo operates under a federal charter, it is not subject to Oregon banking regulations that apply to state-chartered banks. Oregon’s Division of Financial Regulation referred questions to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Susan Grant with the nonprofit Consumer Federal of America said she doesn’t know if there are laws that govern what banks must do to verify a customer’s death. But Grant said she found it confounding that Wells Fargo had messed up such a basic fact about a customer.
“That is just unbelievable,” Grant said. “Imagine all the havoc this could wreak in your life.”
At the least, Grant said that that Cashner and anyone else falsely reported as dead are entitled to the same legal protections as anyone else when erroneous information shows up in their credit file.
“You certainly have the right to dispute wrong information on your credit report and unauthorized charges on your credit card,” Grant said. “You’ve got a variety of rights if there’s misinformation about you.”
In Cashner’s case, demonstrating that she remained among the living required a succession of calls to Wells Fargo customer service agents who seemed unimpressed by her evident resurrection.
“They’re not amused but they, they’re not horrified either,” Cashner said. “They’re just: ‘Oh.’ ”
A retired secretary who formerly worked for the California Legislature, Cashner moved to Oregon in 2005 and soon after set up her Wells Fargo account. Cashner said she received various explanations from Wells Fargo about who reported her dead, and the bank repeatedly refused to give her specifics.
Does she have any enemies?
“Not that I know of,” Cashner said with a mischievous laugh.
Although some “non estate” charges still appear on her credit card bill, Cashner said the bank now tells her she doesn’t owe them. Wells Fargo ultimately summoned Cashner to a local branch where she presented her driver’s license and signed a form called a “declaration of life.”
“The lady at Wells Fargo told me I looked good,” Cashner said. “So, I did like her for that.”