KANSAS CITY, Kan. — You’d think that safe deposit boxes would be the safest place to keep your valuables, but a Kansas woman said she no longer believes that after her safe deposit box went temporarily missing from the bank where she’d kept it for years.
“The deed to my house, the title to my car, my birth certificate,” said Sandra Owens, recalling just some of the important documents she had stored in her safe deposit box.
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She never gave those documents another thought until this past December when she got a letter from her bank informing her that the branch where her safe deposit box was located had closed and her box had been moved to a new location.
That’s where this problem starts.
Days after receiving the letter, Owens paid a visit to the new location to check on her safe deposit box. It was then that a bank employee told her some horrible news.
“She says the whole box was missing,” Owens recalled.
The bank employee suggested Owens might have taken the box.
“Maybe you came in and got your box and you don’t remember,” Owens said she was told.
“I’m old, but I can remember if I came in and got my safe deposit box,” Owens said.
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Upset that all her personal documents appeared to have vanished, Owens called her sister, who drove down to the bank to try and help, to no avail.
Owens even contacted Kansas City Kansas police. But police told her she couldn’t make a theft report because there was no evidence of a crime.
FOX4 Problem Solvers shared Owens story with Dave McGuinn, president of Safe Deposit Specialists. He was not surprised.
“I’ve got 11 cases going on here in my office where similar things have happened,” he said.
McGuinn, a former banker, now trains banks on how to manage and protect safe deposit boxes. He said some institutions do a pretty bad job with safe deposit boxes, putting both the customer and the bank at risk.
He said that’s one of the reasons many big banks are getting out of the safe deposit box business. The other driving force is the space that safe deposit boxes require. Many banks are shedding the service as they downsize their physical locations.
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Bank behemoth Chase recently stopped offering safe deposit boxes at its 5,700 branches nationwide.
But McGuinn said don’t fear that safe deposit boxes are completely disappearing. Many credit unions are picking up the slack in hopes of winning new customers.
McGuinn said if you are in the market for a safe deposit box be careful who you chose. He has a list of 30 questions you should ask – the most important being does the financial institution let people in the safe- deposit -box vault alone?
If it does, don’t put your belongings there. You don’t want any customer to be left alone in the room where your safe deposit box is also located.
“There are tools that you can buy on the internet now that will open every safe deposit box in there in a matter of seconds,” McGuinn said.
In addition, McGuinn recommended that you choose only financial institutions that require two keys to open a safe deposit box. He said two keys provide a level of security you don’t want to bypass.
Also, keep in mind that the contents of your safe deposit box are not insured by the financial institution. You would have to sue and prove that the institution was at fault for your items disappearing.
There is a happy ending to Owens saga. She got her safe deposit box back from the Bank of Labor. She said the bank’s senior vice president made it his personal mission to find it.
“Just give me 24 hours and I’ll see what I can do,” Owens said she was told.
The very next day, he called her with the good news.
Somehow her box got left behind in that now closed, but still locked bank branch on Minnesota Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas.
A bank spokeswoman blamed part of the confusion over of the location of the box on the fact that Owens had multiple family members with legal access to the box. That’s why it was first believed that she or one of her family members had taken it.
“I was just totally relieved,” Owens said.
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