Glitch at First Keystone Community Bank briefly affects thousands of accounts

Aug. 07--Eileen Karpe moved out of town years ago but has an account at First Keystone Community Bank for life insurance payments.

The 81-year-old widow worries about those payments and checks her balance online often.

At noon Saturday, Karpe noticed the bank charged her $150 for an "ATM Transaction Fee."

"How could someone possibly get anything out of the ATM?" Karpe asked, thinking someone withdrew money from her account.

She was right, actually.

Karpe called the Stroudsburg bank, which told her of some sort of "computer glitch," with lots of other customers affected.

It turns out that every single checking and savings account at the bank was hit with a rogue, computer-generated $150 debit, and most customers didn't even know about it.

So what happened?

"There was a programming error that was made in our operations center here in Berwick that inadvertently charged all the checking and savings accounts $150," First Keystone Community Bank CEO Matt Prosseda said.

The new programming responsible for the glitch was introduced into the system early Saturday morning. The bank became aware of it when one of its employees noticed a strange debit while checking their balance.

It took the processing team about three hours to write a script to reverse all the transactions, Prosseda said.

"Customers, once they learned we were aware of the problem and were going to fix it, they just went on with their day," he said.

No overdraft fees were assessed, and since it happened over the weekend, no checks were returned as a result of insufficient funds.

One of the first things First Keystone did was put up a message on the bank's website. The message said the bank was aware of the glitch, and it was taking steps to mediate it.

"No customer data was compromised," Prosseda added.

___

(c)2014 the Pocono Record, Stroudsburg, Pa.

Visit the Pocono Record, Stroudsburg, Pa. at http://www.poconorecord.com/

Distributed by MCT Information Services