BofA charged me over two hundred dollars at once (and only slightly less on several more occasions).

I check my bank account online obsessively because I need to come very close to overdrafting to get by some weeks.

My list of transactions online showed that I never went below zero, until the first overdraft fee put me under. Let me repeat that. I had positive money, then subtract $35, now I had negative money. This overdraft was placed back in time about 3 or 4 days, causing overdraft fees for every small transaction I made during that time, even though I checked my balance every day during that time to make sure I had enough in to cover them, and the overdraft had certainly not appeared by then. I went in to the nearest branch and the lady there showed me a list very similar to what I can see online, but the withdrawals and deposits were in a totally different order. I asked why I couldn't see them in the same order online, and she told me that this was to make it easier for me to understand!

Even worse, the transaction that supposedly put me under was a charge for BofA checks and address labels that my wife had ordered over a month before that. They waited a month to charge me for them, coincidentally at the same time when I was within a few dollars of being over. Oh and they charged me twice- one for the checks andone for the labels. Two overdrafts, two purchases, both made with the same click of the mouse.

I demanded my money back. I even resorted to "whatever happened to the customer is always right?" She deleted two $35 fees. I don't know why, just to shut me up, I guess. That left me still out at least $150. I told her that wasn't good enough, either give me it all, or close the account. She said she can't close an account with a negative balance. I told her that it would just have to stay negative then, they weren't getting one more cent from me. Then she told me, "Well, I can't just give you two hundred dollars for no reason."

This sent me into screaming, cursing mode. "BITCH IT'S MY FUCKING MONEY! I'm not asking you to GIVE me SHIT! I'm asking you not to STEAL MY FUCKING MONEY!!"

She picked up the phone and started to dial. I figured I was beat, and it was time to leave.

The Merrill Lynch unit of Bank of America managed to lose $15 billion dollars in one year and was rewarded with $3.5 billion in bonuses for its top executives.

Perhaps if you can come up with an idea for losing even more money, they will give you your money back.

I drive around all the time with my fuel tank on “E.” If the gauge dips below the lowest level of empty, and I’m near a gas station, I’ll put a dollar’s worth of gas in my car and drive around some more.

I don’t bother trying to really figure out how much gas I have or how far away the nearest gas station is or when I might need to put more gas in the tank. I just take educated guesses. It doesn’t make any sense to me to fill the tank even a quarter way full just to be on the safe side. Even though I’m always on the edge of empty, I don’t have a AAA membership as insurance to provide me with roadside emergency gas. Why should I pay for that?

When I run out of gas and I’m stranded on the side of the road, I blame the gas station. It’s all their fault.

How quaint. Not actually comparable to the OPs situation, but cute and condescending none the less.

1. You assume the OP has the money to create a cushion in his account or pay additional fees to get overdraft coverage and just chooses to live near the edge.. He may be living paycheck to paycheck and carefully budgeting to simply avoid spending more than he takes in every month.

2. Online bank account entries should be consistent with the bank's own records. It's not a gas tank gauge with empty, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and full marks that may or may not be reliable. It's an electronic records system. There's an expectation that it's accurate.

A car doesn't let you drive around for days without gas, all the while telling you that you do have gas, and then charge you exorbitant fees for every drop of nonexistent gas you used during those few days.

A car doesn't wait until you are almost out of gas (with plenty left to get to a gas station), to say, "Oh yeah, remember that trip to the mall last month, well I never took the gas out of the tank for that! So what I'm going to do is take it out 5 days ago, when you didn't have enough gas to cover last month's trip, so I'm going to have to take an extra 1/4 tank (as of 5 days ago). Oh my! Taking that into account, it looks when you gassed up 4 days ago, you didn't put enough in, and you've been driving with negative gas for 3 days!"

5 years ago it was necessary for me to spend long periods of time in Canada where I used my Wachovia debit card regularly. Every day or so I would go online and check my account to see if ACH wires hit and to verify charges etc. One day after making many debit card charges exceeding a few thousand dollars (well within my balance incidentally) i visited my online account to see that I was overdrawn. Delving further I noticed that not only was the timing of the purchases different from my receipts but that there were duplicate charges from each "vendor" that differed by a few cents each. The overdraft fees exceed $500.00 but the real problem was the duplicate hits. I called Wachovia and after creeping up the IQ quotient of customer service reached a supervisor. I explained to him that I was well versed in "exchange arbitrage" and could plainly see what they were doing, i.e settling the exchange rate by double charging - once at the Canadian rate and then at the settled US rate. I was immediately refunded.

Ironically, my wife was constantly overdrawn (she too was up in Canada) in her personal account and too embarrassed to mention it to me even though she carefully manged her accounts. When I told her of my experience she told me of her problem and asked if I would look at her account. Long story short - Wachovia returned over $1,600.00 in over draft fees (they could only go back 60 days or it would have been more) after I called the aforementioned supervisor.

I marvel to this day how much those bastards stole from people unable to contesst them.

enfermot, The point of my fable is that if you live your life on a razor's edge of disaster, you can't blame others when you get cut. You're mad because the bank charged you for checks you ordered more than a month after you placed the order. Did you think because they hadn't charged you in a month that they would never charge you? Just give you a freebie? This wasn't a surprise fee coming out of nowhere - this was a charge you had agreed to. As soon as you placed your order, you should have written that expense down in your checkbook and expected it to come out of your account at some point. (Ironically, many people would have been happy to have the extra "float" the bank gave you by not charging you immediately.) You say: "My list of transactions online showed that I never went below zero, until the first overdraft fee put me under." How could an overdraft fee put you below zero when an overdraft fee isn't charged until after you're already below zero? This makes no sense. But the statement is also irrelevant. No matter what order those charges were made, the fact remains that you had more outstanding charges than you had money in your account. It sucks the way they penalized you, but it was ultimately the charges that you made that put you in the negative. The original sin was yours alone. And it's great to be able to check your accounts online, but your online account doesn't have psychic abilities. It can't tell you about items that will be posted at some point in the future. If you write a check to a friend, and that friend doesn't cash the check right away, there's no way for your account to magically tell you that a debt will be coming - it's up to you to write it down and make sure your balance will cover it. The same is true of any charge, whether it originates inside or outside the bank. If you're forced by circumstance to live with a balance always floating just above or at zero, I feel for you. But that's all the more reason to be relentlessly vigilant about exactly how much money is going in and coming out.

Watsonho, Enfermot's complaint is even less reasonable than what you've indicated: In most jurisdictions, it's actually illegal for the bank to charge for the product until they're ready to ship it. So his complaint is that they didn't break the law by billing him sooner.

Watsonho:

You say: "My list of transactions online showed that I never went below zero, until the first overdraft fee put me under." How could an overdraft fee put you below zero when an overdraft fee isn't charged until after you're already below zero? This makes no sense.

My thoughts exactly. This was part of the argument that I made to the bank lady. But the list of transactions she had access to told a different story. Another thing they did was charge me twice for a single order of two items which arrived in a single box. Two overdraft fees. And when the charge did appear, it was not dated the time of the order, or the date when the charge appeared, but about 5 days before that. The charges for the order and the two overdraft fees caused every transaction for the 5 days between the date of the charge and the date it appeared to incur fees. All during that time the website was telling me I had money in my account.

To clarify, the date the charges occurred, I did not have enough in to cover them. The next day I put money in that would have covered the debits I made over the next few days. Except at that time I did not know about the two charges in question, as they had not shown up, not even as pending.

While you DID overreact, I can understand why. I've been through this kind of crap before - banks using technicalities and the deliberate unreliabilities of their own online information to sock you with overdraft fees, then acting like they're doing you a BIG favor by giving some of it back - just this ONCE, just to be NICE to you.

They're scum. They deliberately steal from you, but if you get too loud, don't doubt for a minute that they'd have you arrested. And their lawyers say they're ALWAYS going to be right.

Always.

If he could give them an idea for taking more money from their customers, they might make him one of those executives!

Heh

Foolish comparison.

Gas companies don't come and take gas OUT of your tank because you drive beyond some limit they've pre-set for you.

Blame yourself for being a smug idiot.

Of course you can blame them, if they provide unreliable information and mishandle deposits to your account so that they work in the bank's favor.

For example, an overdraft fee may not be charged until you're below zero, true. But if you have reason to think you're ABOVE zero due to the bank's malfeasance, it's certainly wrong for them to hit you with exaggerated, extra fees in order to make more money off of you.

Online banking doesn't need "psychic abilities," just accuracy. Is that too much to ask?

Well, nitwit, if gas stations arbitrarily charged you an extra hundred bucks or so just because your tank was empty, your analogy would be complete.