Not Gonna' Bank Here No Mo'

So having an early email account is a lot of fun. Getting email that's not intended for me gives me quite the glimpse into lives of other people of similar names from around the world. Some of it's interesting, some of it's fun, and some of it's just sad.

Most of the time I'll try to get the other end straightened out. Many of the emails I end up with are for mailing lists I didn't sign up for, which are happy to unsubscribe me. Occasionally I get an order confirmation, which I'll try to redirect, but generally can't. You generally don't need your airline ticket confirmations anyway.

This time I got some seemingly important banking information.

Nothing to specific, not one of those 'here's all of your account information, numbers, and balance for all time' things, but a still likely-to-be-important bill-pay message.

Ok, someone signed up for online banking with my email address. I couldn't go remove my address; even if I had the password (I don't know if the bank will send the password to the address on file or not, I'm not willing to try), it wouldn't be nice or possibly even legal to use someone else's bank account. Even if only to remove my email address.

So I emailed the bank itself. Of course, it took the better part of an hour to /find/ a way to contact the bank. But I finally found it, emailed them, and then less than 4x the 12-hour promised response time later I got my answer.

Phishing Scam.

The bank thought I received a phishing scam email. Or, more likely, they just didn't want to deal with it, so they used their buzzword-of-the-week calendar. Now, I know it's not the bank's problem or fault that someone else used my email address on their account, but I figured they'd have a chance of being able to take care of it. And I might possibly convince them to see the light when it comes to email address confirmation, especially for sensitive financial information. I, obviously, was wrong.

So a week or so later, with the next bill-pay message, I sent another email telling them the problem still existed. "Provide us with...any relevant information," they said, "[for] locating the customer's account and [they would] have the issure corrected immediately." Sweet, they're actually going to do something. I thought. I was wrong.

I sent the information. Everything I had. I just sent them the email right back. Copy. Paste. Send. There should be enough there. Alas. I was wrong.

"Because your account security is our highest priority, we are unable to process your request through unsecured e-mail." It's too bad security for my non-existant account is their top priority, and that their actual customers are somewhere below me in their priority queue, but sure, maybe they're like Netflix and treat you worse the longer your business relationship with them has been. Fine, makes sense in some backward sort of way.

But what exactly are they hoping will occur in our communication that can't occur over email? Am I supposed to give them an account number or password? Am I supposed to read minds? And how glad should I be that I don't actually do business with this bank? How sad should I be that I do actually do business with /any/ bank, or should I attempt to hold some completely unfounded belief that my bank cares any more than that one does?