This is incredibly fishy to me. I trust amazon enough, but my actual bank account login and password? Forget it. The alternative verification method seems to be unavailable to me right now. Any suggestions, thoughts, experiences?
Did you try verifying via the random deposits method? On the 'Adding and verifying accounts' page there is a link - Adding and Verifying a New Bank Account to Your Account Using Random Deposits. Try this, hope you don't have to give away your log-in details.
Yeah there are the two methods to verify, either the random deposit which takes some time or the login credentials. When I signed up about a month ago I did the login credentials. Yeah It was scared, but also I have more than one account, one is kinda my "junk" bank account that I use to pay for stuff online that I use to pay bills online and stuff, it doesn't receive any large sums of money. I used that one and it went smoothly for me. If you don't have another account there are tons of online banks, but you know the random deposit way, while being old school, works just fine. Of course its all up to you. I live online so I pretty much trust Amazon, but not everyone does.
Success! Sorry to have bothered you guys with my original post. I wrote to Amazon and they wrote back a very nice email with instructions to delete my bank account and then re-insert it. It worked. The 2nd verification method was suddenly available to me. Thanks so much for your advice, guys! Good idea on the "Junk" bank account. I have one, too, but online it's connected to the real ones and I was too lazy to figure out how to put them on separate logins.
This was not the first time I have seen it, giving the password. It's only for verification, as far as I can tell, no problems. Instantly adds the account.