Andrew Shilling at MarketWatch answered a reader who met every term of a $1,500 bank bonus offer, got denied twice by customer service, and wanted to know how to get the money. He asked me how to escalate.
Two denials from the same department is a pattern, not bad luck. My advice was to skip the general line and go straight to the bank's executive response team, or the office of the president if it is large enough to have one, since that group operates outside the reps who already said no twice.
Once a dispute drags on, documentation matters more than people think. Save the original offer screenshot, the account opening confirmation and every transaction that proves you met the terms, then log every call: date, name, reference number. No paper trail, no proof. If the bank still will not move, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau takes complaints, and denied bonuses in the low thousands are usually well within small claims range, so it is not a dead end.
The prevention point I made: people assume the biggest mistake is picking the wrong bank. It is usually not. It is missing the exact wording of the qualifying deposit. Read that sentence twice before you move a dollar.
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