Free Babysitting Provided in Wells Fargo Vault

Recently, a fourteen-month-old baby spent four long and frightening hours surrounded by safe deposit boxes after she was locked inside a Wells Fargo Bank vault in Conyers, Georgia.

Picture This. . . .

A little girl and her mother arrive at Wells Fargo Bank to visit with her grandmother, a bank employee. While mom and grandmother visited, the toddler wandered unnoticed into the safe deposit vault. As bad luck and poor security procedures would have it, the vault door time clock was set, the door was shut and the toddler was now locked inside. The baby immediately started to cry when the lights went out and was detected by a security camera monitoring the inside of the vault.

Police and fire department personnel arrived quickly. They pumped oxygen into the vault while awaiting for a police escorted vault door locksmith. After four tense hours of drilling through solid steel, the toddler was returned unharmed to her frantic parents and grandmother.

History Repeats Itself

A few years earlier, at another Wells Fargo (San Francisco) branch on Christmas Eve, the same “free overnight accommodations” were provided to another unsuspecting consumer. Daniel Goldberg, an 81-year-old attorney spent two nights (more than 40 hours) locked inside the bank’s vault. Fortunately for Wells Fargo, the attorney took it in stride and decided not to sue. Had he chosen to do so, Wells Fargo Bank might now be known as Goldberg National Bank.

Other Nationwide Lock-Ins

Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents. They are only two of many such vault lock-in horror stories. There have been others nationwide, including a sweet 86-year-old lady from Tacoma, WA, a Georgia bank president, an eighteen-month-old baby boy and several other elderly box renters. One lock-in victim was even a dog belonging to the Chairman of the Board. The dog was in the facility on a Saturday afternoon when he decided to play hide-n-seek with his master. You can easily guess where he decided to hide. Each of these cases could have resulted in serious liability, injury or even death, all of which would mean significant losses for these institutions.

Bank to the Future

In the banking industry, hard times and holidays equal holdups, but one area financial institution has designed itself around cutting-edge robbery prevention.

According to Vice President Butch Holley, the Augusta Metro Federal Credit Union branch is the only "bank" in 150 square miles with such a forward-thinking layout.The unorthodox concept feels more like a Starbucks than a bank — right down to the smell. “If I could make the smell of apple pie appear when you walk in the front door, I would,” Holley says. “Since I can’t, the coffee pot is the next best thing.”

While the amenities are obvious and unconventional for a financial institution, they’re designed around security. Take the pod system, which places the member side by side with the teller. Though such a setup might appear more exposed and vulnerable, the pod is actually built around a cash-dispensing unit, which is, in effect, its own ATM. In other words, a vault.

Each pod also has a security camera, a signature pad and an ID scanner, which makes it very easy to make sure the customer actually belongs to the account he’s trying to access.

The most impressive piece of technology, however, is the biometric hand scanner, which allows entry into the safety deposit box vault.“It’s a little James Bondish,” Holley admits, “but now you don’t have to wait for a vault teller, and people love that.”

The scanner itself only takes about five minutes to program, and, from there, a customer only has to enter his code, scan his hand and he’s allowed access to the vault.