Did you know:
When you put money into your bank, they may have no responsibility to make sure it stays there. The account-holder agreement you signed may absolve them of any fiduciary responsibility whatsoever as it relates to the safety or security of your money even in a supposedly no-risk checking account.
This means they can, without bothering to check with you, either knowingly or unknowingly aid and abet fraud that removes money from your account; and allow business partners to open secret bank accounts in contravention of any prior agreement you may have had with the partner or the bank; and refuse to cooperate in making things right once money has been taken except under a judge's order--all with impunity!
I discovered this in the outcome of a court case against JPMorgan Chase that went against me. I attempted to retrieve damages from them that I claimed were caused when they allowed an ex-business partner of mine to fraudulently remove me from an account,then remove all the money from said account and move it to a secret account at their bank, all without my consent even though they had insisted on my consent to open the original account.
The judge agreed with Chase's assertion they had no fiduciary responsibility due to a "no fiduciary responsibility" clause in the account-holder agreement--and therefore no culpability at all as certain quite obvious banking shenanigans were perpetrated right under their noses.
It is interesting to note that other institutions, including other large banks, when they learned of these matters, offered full cooperation and saw the trouble immediately. Not Chase.
Caution: your bank may have, as far as the ruling goes, absolutely no responsibility, nor any need of looking out for, the safety of your money.
Naturally a followup letter to the bank's management won a self-serving response noting that no one at the Company had done even a single thing wrong legally or as regards the Company's own policies. Based on their senior branch management's abusive, adversarial stance towards me during a time when their integrity was called upon, this can hardly be credited.
From a marketing standpoint it is essential for banks to encourage a sense of security in the depositor; but at least in my case, this sense of security did not stand the test.
Go ahead and read the fine print in your account-holder agreement--see if your bank will protect you. I was surprised to find out mine would not, and did not.
