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Note: On January 8, 2016 American Express sent out a notice to a large number of Bluebird & Serve cardholders informing them that loading capabilities on their accounts had been terminated. For more information, see: Amex kills Bluebird and Serve for manufactured spend
I’ve heard from quite a few people recently that Bluebird’s bill payments are often going to the wrong biller. Obviously, this can create a huge headache if it happens to you. Personally, I mostly withdraw money directly to my bank account (see “Bluebird’s transfer money button”) so this hasn’t yet happened to me. Instead, I asked fellow blogger @palmerlaw (travelblawg.com) if he’d be interested in doing a quick guest post on this topic. What follows is Mark’s post…
Double Check Where Your Bluebird Payments Flew
Bluebird has been a great tool for paying some payees that do not otherwise (or easily) take credit cards, including rent, tuition, mortgage payments and student loans. However, since Bluebird has made several updates to its website, there have been some reports of errors with what seems to be the conversion of the previously entered payee information.
I heard some reports of users having issues with payments being sent to the wrong payee, so I tried to be extra careful in recent months by deleting an old payee and reentering it before issuing a payment.
While making the online bill pay payments, I did notice that while one payee would be selected to be paid, a different payee would appear on the next confirmation screen. It could be easy to miss. That prompted me to stop, go back, and do the delete-reenter method.
Drat! I must have missed one.
I noticed a large payment still hadn’t posted to a certain Chase credit card. But before giving it another day or two to post, I received a “notice of payment posted” email from… my mortgage company? But I already made that Bluebird payment and already received the notice email for that bill pay. Huh?
I logged in to my mortgage website and sure enough, a payment of $4,010.00 was made (at least all to my principal). Duh! So I went to Bluebird’s website to confirm I wasn’t crazy.
Here’s what I saw on the homepage. That looks correct.
Upon clicking the transaction, it still appears correct.
But thanks to a tip from Erik (@AZTravelGuy), the key to solving the payee mystery was to check your Payee List for last payments made. Yep, there is where my payment really landed!
What should you do?
Double check any recent Bluebird bill payments.
Clear all previous payees and reenter all information before making any new payments.
Too late?
Did the wrong payee transaction cost you a late fee/interest for missing a payment on time? You might be able to get a reimbursement from Bluebird.
Contact Bluebird (24/7 contact 877-486-5990) and refer them to their technical error and commitment to pay the proper payee (on-time). See sections 6(b)(c) and 20 of its Member Agreement here: https://www.bluebird.com/legal#member-agreement. Follow-up snail mail correspondence may be necessary.
A big thanks to Mark for writing up the above post! Checkout his travel + law blog at travelblawg.com.
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[…] out of different accounts from the same computer and browser. At one point in time, for example, Bluebird bill payments were getting sent to the wrong billers! How can you make sure that things like that don’t happen to […]
ouch. Thought I was paying a Bank loan, From another family members BB account. Payment went to a Barclaycard credit card that I don’t use anymore. Called Barclay when I saw the $2,500 overpayment on the account. Phoned then , CSR said they would send me a check. 2 weeks later I got a letter from Barclays saying, the payment was made from a Bill Pay service and the refund was issued to them. I had hoped Blue Bird would get the money back and credit it back to my BB account. another 2 weeks has passed , nothing yet.
What resolution have others had , and how long has it taken. I guess I may have to involve other family member.
Any chance this will sort itself out???
I had a problem with their bill pay being sent to the wrong Chase account A YEAR AGO! I thought it was just me making a mistake…now I am thinking it was quite possibly them (maybe because I was logging into a Serve account and a Bluebird on the same browser and I also had multiple Chase accounts on my bill pay). That bill pay scared me and I ACHed $825 out to my bank. You know they didn’t like that and froze my account till I provided a statement by fax with same address as BB account. They released the funds quickly (luckily) and I have all but abandoned my BB account.
Their card is Third World. I feel sorry for anyone who is unbanked and actually trying to use this as an alternative. If the churners were not using it, who would?
I paid my rent on April 1st with a Bluebird check. I got the preauthorization code and followed the simple directions. Today my landlord says it bounced for Insufficient Funds. $130 in NSF and late fees. HORRIBLE. Has anyone been able to get Bluebird to reimburse Insufficient Fund fees? I look forward to hearing their explanation for this.
I deleted my payee and now get an error that BB is unable to re-add it. The issue seems to be that the address is similar to mine – the payee is my apartment landlord’s on-site office. Frustrating because it’s the same address as before. ALSO the info I enter on Address Line 2 for others payees disappears after I save it. I saw a few instances of this second issue reported on FT. BB site sucks – not to mention that my last bill was paid 5 days late!
[…] need to meet spending threshold’s. One way that we were all doing it was via Vanilla Reloads. We had the full write up over here. So what’s the […]
Just write a BB check & mail it yourself. SO EASY!
add me to the list. some scenario as posted in the blog post grrr.
A payment was one week late….! Not good!!! I have to be able to trust that people are going to follow through their responsibilities. Any more mistakes and i’m gone!
I found a while back that my payments showed going where I intended but being sent somewhere else. I did about three payments and they were all misdirected. I then cancelled all these payments, which I didn’t know you can do.
After some research and setting up another bill pay, I found that since I have 5 accts, the info was being mixed up among the 5 accts. On each acct, I deleted all payees and started over. I re installed all my payees without any non letter in each payee name. Aftre doing this,I logged off and closed the firefox browser. Next, opened chrome and did the same thing to the next acct. Then used IE, doing the same thing. The last two accts, I opened firefox and chrome deleting all cookies/history and did the same.
I now log in to each acct using a different browser. I close the browser each time.
Honestly, this is ludicrous, and if I weren’t doing ms I would have ditched this piece of crap BB right after the first bill pay issue.
I have only one Bluebird account, and have had it for only four months. So far I have paid mortgage x 3 and electric bill X1 with no incidents. Also a number of preauthorized checks no problem. Only glitch was the one payment to my HELOC account took about two weeks to post after I called the bank and told them of the payment that hadn’t posted two weeks after it said it was paid on BB account. After a while they found it and the payment posted. So I assume that all of these problems are due to folks with multiple BB and I have nothing to worry about? Do any of you with complaints have just one BB account? I will still be very careful and maybe use preauthorized checks dropped off in person to my bank for HELOC from now on.
I have had problems for a couple months where the internet version of bluebird wouldn’t let me pay my rent. I would just keep clicking on the submit button and get error saying that I had the wrong zip code. If I use the blueberry app, everything works fine. Also, I’ve tried from the beginning to get sign up for text alerts and I click to have them send me a code to verify but I never get the code. Called t-mobile and was told I would have to allow premium texts in order to receive the ones from bluebird. If it wasn’t for the MS I don’t think that they would have very many customers.
I used bb pre-authorized check to pay my rent. Check was returned NSF. Spoke with property management team (large complex >200 units) and they scan and electronically deposit all checks. Called bb and they couldn’t tell me anything except that I gas the funds. I can only guess that it had something to do with electronically depositing the check since the bb csr kept repeating that my check was pre-authorized. No resolution. Had to write a check from my other account. Will need to call bb to cancel the rejected check.
Can anyone who used the BB “Transfer Money” function report the following. Does the receiving bank treat incoming funds as EFT or Direct Deposit? It’s not always easy to tell the difference, but it’s potentially very useful info 😉
I haven’t personally used that function yet, so the community input would be appreciated.
@phone-home yes the website is badly designed. Try to click on Pay & Transfer tab, then Pay a Bill, then you should see list of payees and a link that says delete payee. Good luck.