Thankfully, most of what I'm about to describe will become illegal on July 1, 2010. But until then, you may want to be watchful of the following, especially if you're a current U.S. Bank customer. And even after that point, you'll still need to be careful not to opt-in to a policy that allows banks to do this to you.
All of the below is on an old checking account that should have been closed long ago, but was left open to make sure all automated charges started getting charged to a new bank. My mistake.
Day 1 - Account balance: $21.01. Automated online check card charge for $30 comes in, and the bank pays it (I'd have preferred it to bounce so that the vendor would contact me for updated payment info). New balance: $-21.01.
Day 2 - Initial overdraft charge: $19.00. New balance: $-40.01. Just so we get this right, the bank charged a fee of $19 to cover a deficit of $21. In effect, this is a 90% interest, 1-day loan. This is already unethical in my view, but it gets worse.
Day 3 - U.S. Bank Online Service Fee: $3.95. They charge almost $4 a month to have access to account information via a website. Is this 1995? New balance: -$43.96.
Day 5 - "Continuous Overdraft" Charge: $8.00. They still haven't contacted me to let me know about the overdraft (the notice is apparently in the mail), but they begin charging $8 per day at this point. New balance: -$51.96.
Day 6 - I receive notice of the original -$21.01 via postal mail. I receive no email notice, despite them having my email on file. Again, is this 1995?
Day 7-9 - The bank is closed (Saturday, Sunday, MLK Day). It's not physically possible for me to come into the bank to clear the negative balance, so I wait.
Day 10 - I visit the bank to find that they've charged an additional 4 days of continuous overdraft charges, despite the fact that the bank was closed all of those days. New balance: -$83.96.
In summary: I've been charged almost 200% interest for a $21.00, 10-day loan I never requested. Even those questionable payday loan outlets have better rates than that. Banks like to pretend that this is a "service" that helps me being embarrassed by a vendor getting notice that may payment was refused, but that's a lie. If they would have refused to pay the original $30 charge, the vendor would nicely contacted me for updated payment info. But the bank chose to pay the charge on my behalf because it gave them an opportunity to take $59 from me. This "service" nets banks tens of billions in revenue every year, and the majority of it isn't stolen from abandoned checking accounts like mine, but from primary accounts of people who are barely making ends meet.
I ask the bank manager to reverse the charges. She has to ask the branch manager of the branch where the account was opened to reverse the charges (what a beautiful corporate bureaucracy that is). The other branch manager refused to reverse the charges. Her reason: because I want to close the account. In other words, the bank doesn't want to be fair and make me happy because I might not give them any more money in the future.
Well, turn that "might not give them any more money" into a "definitely won't ever, now that you've stolen from me", and you get the picture. Oh, and I'll blog about it so you might get less money from other customers as well. Thankfully, this is not 1995, and information travels quickly. With any luck, this post will make its rounds to thousands of other U.S. Bank customers who might decide to close their accounts just like I did.
If you're interested in supporting some pending legislation on this topic, a number of bills in Congress are addressing this and similar issues.
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