Well, I hate to break it to you, but Chase bank has also done all of the things mentioned in these comments. I had a business card with them with a $10,000 limit and they canceled it without notice.

This vote looks like a lot of jumping on the bandwagon to me... Circuit City was by FAR a worse company than BoA. I worked for circuit city as a computer technician... they treated employees even worse than they made the employees treat customers. I would get YELLED at and threatened for putting customers first... it was that bad.

Circuit City isn't even a real company! Why are they even listed?!

[promo.bankofamerica.com]

In this case your just relying to heavily on the literal definition of the word evil. For this blog's purposes and how widely used the word is here, the term evil aptly defines many of these companies. Obviously none of these companies are going around and murdering, pillaging, and torturing innocent people, which one could argue is the true definition of an evil entity, however within the context of this blog and how the word is used in this blog; these companies are considered evil.

So when people say such and such company is evil they are applying these standards to it. If all you want to do it get into a literary argument over proper use of the word then your in the wrong blog and your definitely in the wrong language. English is one of the most flexible languages in the world and words are always being adapted and changed to suit other needs.

Bank of America is still alive, though. I just wonder how many customers it continues to gouge with high interest rates, predatory lending practices and similar stuff. Or maybe I'm just also biased against gigantic financial conglomerates.

--dr.bomb

@HFC: Worst could be interpreted either as naughty or poorly run, which is why it's such a beautiful word. I try to vote on balance - which company/management just scares the crap out of me. In the AIG/PCA, for example, AIG seems greedy while PCA just doesn't care - the latter is more scary to me. In this one, BoA was scarier to me than CC (I actually had more good than bad experiences at CC). CC was more poorly run, but BoA would probably destroy my fiscal life and think nothing of it.

Which is why I use them for my safe deposit box.

With that said, Circuit City was just plain lame. Yeah, they fought me of a bad dvd player - wahh... They shorted me $10.00 on a coupon...

BoA however can really fark things up for you and take months to fix it. Now BoA can really be worrisome. In my case they linked my credit card to someone-else's checking account's overdraft protection. At the end of the month found my card was tipple maxed over $10k, Took them eight weeks months to fix it. Then they tried to re-bill me for the interest from their fault, THEN AT MONTH FIVE there were still transactions "Stuck" in their system and that took another two months to fix.

@saya:

Yes, exactly.

Circuit City (#5955) crushes Bank of America (#705) on Vanno.

DOWn, baby, DOWn!

I opened up a Keep the Change account with B of A, which rounded up every debit card purchase to the nearest dollar and put the change in a savings account. I had to open a savings account to use this feature. Then they charged me $4 per month for the savings account. What a ripoff.

I'm now with a credit union. It sucks, too, but not as badly as B of A.

Wait, what?

Wow, this is kinda like back in grade school when we picked up for dodgeball and I'd get picked second to last because I wasn't as bad as Jeff M****s. Then Jeff changed schools and I moved into last pick, AKA - best target, by default...

Winning the worst company award just isn't satisfying. They need to file chapter 7 along with Merril Lynch

@yagisencho: If only BoA would die already. I just loved the article by one of the family members of the founder: priceless!

Seeing as how this contest is being run by a blog about consumer rights one can naturally assume that the context of the competition is how said company treats their employees, consumers, and general environment as a whole (i.e. how "evil" that are) as opposed to how successful the business is.

Were this competition being held in a Business Blog then one could naturally assume the opposite but it's not therefor it's most likely a competition about the evilness of said corporations.

Now and then I have dealt with B of A, my most recent experience was opening a checking account to direct deposit my SSN check. It was closed 2 days later and it took six weeks to get my $100 opening deposit back. You can see details on this nonsense at: [bankofamericageorgiasucks.blogspot.com] one thing I caught them on was that their fraud department will access your credit reports and use them in making the decision to close the account but the DO NOT notify you that the credit bureaus were used.

The Executive Office guy accidently made reference to their having done a credit report and I was all over him like stink on a cheap suit for their NOT having provided me with the required letter so I could exercise my right to obtain copies of the 2 bureau reports.

I did eventually get the letter and I imagine that the guy got ripped a new one by B of A for having made tyhe mistake of letting this way they ignore Federal credit regulations. You can see the correspondence and how this played out on the above site. If you are in a dispute with them you might want to print out a copy of the B of A letter for your files.

(I worked for BofA once, incidentally. It was not a bad place to work. But I still felt no urge to bank there. Maybe I would have changed my mind had I been there longer.)

@INsano: I would argue that it should be stated this way:

"BOA is THE standard in banking soulless, greedy, sell-your-own-mother-then-give-yourself-... to which all greedy banks aspire."

@JediJohn82: Exactly.

I've never opened an account with Bank of America, and yet I've had three with them. The first was when they bought SeaFirst Bank. The second was when they bought MBNA. and the third was when they bought Countrywide.

Given how they've found new and exciting ways to extract money from me each time they take over the companies I *wanted* to do business with, I've spent the better part of my adult life running away from these bastards.

Psst...BoA - I'm about to refinance my home so that you stop receiving interest payments from me. Now fark off.

My vote is BOA.

Hmmmm - given that one doesn't exist any more, I'm going to go with the alternative.