Bank of America has been accused of using a Twitter bot after its official customer service account reacted to a flurry of mocking tweets with what appear to be canned responses.
On Saturday tweeter @dathmarkh reported being chased away from outside of BofA's New York headquarters by cops for 'chalkupy-ing' - drawing a chalk picture in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement - the pavement.
When another tweeter, @stevetimmis, sarcastically replied, cc'ing @bankofamerica, the bank's dedicated customer support account jumped in asking if it could help.
From there, the situation escalated as tweeters piled in with mocking and accusatory messages to the bank, which were answered with polite, seemingly unrelated, and near-identical responses, complete with the initials of the staff member supposedly on duty.
Programmer Eksith Rodrigo has
screencapped all of the related thirty-odd exchanges. Finextra has tweeted @BofA_Help to ask whether it sends out automated tweets, but the person/bot has yet to respond.
Update:The account has responded: