It depends on the bank

Posted by MCM bait (66.149.179.202) on March 12, 2004 at 18:20:05:

In Reply to: Re: debit (check) card security question posted by J Kelly on March 12, 2004 at 17:23:11:

Most banks do credit your account immediately upon getting your dispute, but not all. By law, they *have* to credit your account (unless it's a new account) within ten business days of the dispute in writing. But they could take up to 90 days (for point of sale transactions) to complete their investigation.

So theoretically, your money could be out of your account for THREE WEEKS while the bank investigates. That's fine and good if you don't have any outstanding checks that will put you into an overdrawn situation.

Luckily, I haven't had to dispute but two POS transactions in my life. (Wish I could say the same about CC's, though!) They were with different banks, and one credited my account immediately. The other took seven days to credit my account and a full month to finish their investigation. I was extremely fortunate with the latter that I caught the problem before I wrote a lot of checks on the account, because the error was an extra zero on the *wrong* side of the decimal point. :-)

Follow Ups:

Post a Followup