Rachel’s 86-year-old grandmother was a loyal Wells Fargo customer for more than thirty years. She’s been forced to take her business to a new bank because Wells Fargo representatives refuse to talk to her.

See, she became profoundly deaf about twenty years ago, and makes her phone calls through a TTY relay service. A few weeks ago, Wells Fargo customer service reps abruptly stopped accepting relay calls, claiming it was a new fraud prevention policy.

First, a bit of background information on the equipment Rachel refers to in her e-mail. A TTY (also known as a TDD or text telephone) is a device that people with hearing or speech disabilities use to communicate over standard phone lines. They haven’t changed much since the 1980s, but are still in common use. It has a keyboard, a small screen, and sometimes a printer. TTY machine users can call each other, or they can dial in to tax-funded relay services, where a hearing person acts as an intermediary between the parties. (I worked as a relay operator for a while after college. I spent a lot of time getting paid to listen to AOL…..Read More.

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