I need your input because I think this is on a larger scale then I thought. If what I described in this diary has happened to anyone else with a Bank of America account (or any account where activity has been “irregular” lately) please tell me in the comment threads or via email if you’re concerned about privacy. Use
Guerrilla Mail for a fake account to contact me if you’re that paranoid.
Three (3) is the number of overdraft charges people have told me they have incurred even though…well…they shouldn’t have.
The sampling (my “n” I suppose) was somewhat random as well as close friends. My friends vary in their fiscal responsibility but when even the Republican ones are complaining about it I know that this is a pattern that suggests it is deliberate by Bank of America.
The people I didn’t know were classmates that I overheard talking about BOA charging three (3) overdrafts even though they had hundreds of dollars just a few hours before they made another purchase. The same response was given when their friends asked “did you call to see what happened?” to which the response (response my friends gave too) was “they told me I needed to take into account the charges I had pending that weren’t shown on my statement”. Yes, charges are pending, but we ain’t telling you which ones and if you look at the fine print, BOA is allowed to place a hold on charges until they feel it is necessary to release it.
Same excuse they gave when I asked them why it would take 11 days to process a check I put in.
What are the chances that 5 people that know each other (but the bank doesn’t know they know each other) experienced the same problem, with the same frequency, and the same exact situation?
What is the possibility that a random conversation one butts in on to tell others it happened to them and their friends is experiencing the same thing, from the same bank, around the same time as everyone else?
What is the probability of this being random?
Does it show a pattern indicative of a systematic function or a random fluke of continuing coincidence?
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to you.
Capital One did/does the same thing. They even charged me an overdraft fee on a mistake they made, took me weeks to get my money back. I don’t keep much money in my account, I like cash.
There was some discussion on this on Dkos a while back.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
Do as Dkos search for Banl of America and you get all kinds of hits that might answer your question. Yes, sweetheart BoA is a shark.
http://www.dailykos.com/search…
I was with them for years… Natwest ate Fleet and then BoA ate Natwest. I left them after the robofees became completely insane and they refused to refund some of them.
If you have to use a bank, use a credit union. Most of them have free checking.
Also watch out for this one – lately there’s a “cash back” scam where cashiers will process a cash back transaction without asking the customer about it. They keep the cash for themselves and most of the time the customer doesn’t check their receipt until it’s too late. Most of the stores this happens in are smaller ones where the cashier can get away with it because they’re extremely busy and there’s no automated record of who was on what register at a particular time.
if not the only, one of the few trade union owned and run banks in the country…