Wells Fargo customers scramble after deposits disappear from their accounts

Amber Matherly had planned to move into her new apartment Thursday.

To do so, Matherly, a Dallas resident, had deposited a check into her Wells Fargo account the previous evening; she also expected a direct deposit to hit by the time she awoke.

But when the morning rolled around and she went to check her account, Matherly found that not only were the deposits missing, but that her entire account had been overdrawn by hundreds of dollars.

“Entirely panicked,” Matherly said, she raced to a local Tom Thumb convenience store to get a money order, and ended up having to borrow $500 from a friend to get the funds necessary to secure her new keys.

“I have never had any issues with them before, so this was shocking,” said Matherly, who said in a message to NBC News that she’s been with Wells Fargo since about 2009.

For the second time this year, Wells Fargo acknowledged that deposits were not showing up in customers’ accounts. In an emailed statement Friday morning, a Wells Fargo representative said the issue was affecting a “limited number of customers,” and that “the vast majority” of instances had been resolved before noon, while the “few remaining” would be resolved soon.

This week’s incident mirrored one encountered by Wells Fargo customers in March, which the company then blamed on an unspecified “technical issue.”

The Wells Fargo representative declined to comment further Friday about what caused this week’s incident, nor specify whether it was related to the March incident, nor exactly how many customers had been affected.

The outage comes as NBC News reports phony bank accounts have resurfaced at Wells Fargo. The bank has paid billions in fines and has cycled through two CEOs since the issue was first reported in 2011. This time, the issue was blamed on third-party fraudsters. Wells Fargo representative Amy Bonitatibus told NBC News that allegations of unlawful activity by Wells Fargo are without merit and that identity theft is a broad industry problem that the bank is working to address.

Customers nationwide appeared to be affected by this week’s outage.

Jeani Cortez, a single, disabled, self-employed accountant and Alaska resident, says she was supposed to have paid her rent, gas, electric and internet payments for the month by now with funds she deposited Wednesday.

She said she was told Friday by a Wells Fargo representative that she would not be able to access her deposit for another three to five business days. She’d earlier been told that Wells Fargo could send her a letter to give to her creditors; that too has not arrived.

“There is simply not enough funds (without that deposit) to cover them all,” she wrote in an email, adding: “I simply cannot live without my funds now.”

For Brent Morrison, a Texas resident and father of two, the Thursday outage was doubly painful: He was laid off less than two weeks ago.

“That money was a little bit important to me yesterday,” Morrison said in a phone interview Friday.

While the funds — approximately $2,000 — ultimately did appear in his account, Morrison said he’d also been affected by the March outage, so he is now looking to move his money to a local bank, he said.

“They lost a customer. I just have no choice,” Morrison said. “It just doesn’t make sense to continue with them. The words ‘banking’ and ‘confidence’ shouldn’t end in a question mark.”