Dissociated Press

Without going into a great deal of detail, let me just say that if you’re looking for a bank for a checking or savings account, or if you have a choice of banks for an auto loan or other type of loan avoid Fifth Third Bank if at all humanly possible.

Long story short: I’ve been fighting with Fifth Third Bank for a couple of months now about providing proof of insurance for my car between October and December of 2007. (Fifth Third has the loan on my car.)

In December of 2007, they sent me a letter saying that they had no proof of insurance (I’ve had State Farm since 1989, without a lapse in coverage since) and would be billing me retroactively for coverage during that period until I provide proof of insurance. They sent this to the wrong address because they failed to update my address after I went to a local branch of the bank and gave a teller the new information along with a payment.

Now, how it’s legal for a company to retroactively bill for insurance coverage, I have no idea — since I can obviously make no use of insurance for a period of time that has passed — but they’ve either claimed they did not receive proof of insurance from State Farm or refused to accept the form of proof from State Farm several times now. I’ve spent well over five hours of my time calling Fifth Third about this problem and have also no doubt wasted quite a lot of my insurance agent’s time.

With any luck, it will be resolved soon — but I will be looking to pay this loan off early or find another lender to allow me to get away from Fifth Third and warn as many people as possible to avoid doing any business with this bank.

What galls me most of all is that the bank acknowledges they’ve spoken to State Farm and have been told that, yes, I do and have had coverage — but they refuse to accept that as confirmation. They also accept no blame for failing to update my address, and no shame whatsoever about trying to charge me for insurance during a period of time that has already passed and can be of no use whatsoever except as a penalty for not assisting the bank with their shoddy recordkeeping.