E-Tradebank has a very nice feature which let’s you do regular ACH transfers to other accounts. This weekend I was in the middle of adding such an external account when I suddenly received a notice saying something like “we are concerned about fraudulent activity in your account and need to verify your identity”. I was a bit surprised since I had added several external accounts before but on the other hand did not mind since clearly this is a way folks might try to steal money from an account. The system then proceeded to present me with three multiple choice questions that were clearly based on some kind of credit database. First question was about which car I had owned listing different models – easy. Second one was about previous employees – also easy. But the third question asked me about the age of a Kerri Wenger. Huh? The possible answers were a series of age ranges starting at 18 and “I don’t know this person option”. Well, I have a daughter but her name is Katie and she is a lot younger than 18 so that last choice seemed like the right one. Click. Next. “Your account access has been suspended due to possible fraudulent activity. Please call customer support at 1.800 …”. At this point I was getting fairly irritated because a 2 minute task had already taken up 10 minutes of my time and now I had to pick up the phone. So I called customer support. After the usual phonetree and wait I got to a support rep who spend a minute or two looking at my account and then told me that the “security team” is available only Monday to Friday and I would have to call back on Monday (this despite the fact that the website and the email that I received both stated that the team was available 7 days a week). Determined not to let this ruin my mood for the weekend I simply shrugged it off. But then came Monday and I was on hold for 20 minutes with the security team before hanging up in frustration. On Tuesday same thing. At this point I was livid, called the main customer support line and threatened to close down my account. Luckily the rep I got seemed to understand that this was a huge screwup on their part and while he could not get through to the security team right away either, he took down my cell and called me back with security on the line. So what is the upshot here? Commerce and finance sites should have automated fraud checks - this is a best practice. But those fraud checks will create false positives. It is essential that sites have highly responsive customer service for those cases. E-Trade totally flunked that last part.