that sounds very illegal, collecting a fee on a government fine.

Under that logic, wouldn't ANYTHING you charge to a credit card be considered a cash advance?

Wells Fargo has done this to me before. I opened a new account with PenFed and they needed $10 to open it, I used my credit card (because they said I could) and wellsfargo charged me $30 for a cash advance.

I wonder if this is a byproduct of how those transactions are recorded. If the agency only accepts cash or debit (I know of a number that do) and the credit card was run as a debit card that would explain it. The credit card only sees cash coming out, not the nature of the transaction.

Otherwise BOOOOOOOO. You cant arbitrarily decide that some types of transactions get extra fees.

Just another example of the free market at work. These idiots simply redefine a charge as a cash advance and start collecting fees. Any lawyers out there, please start filing paperwork for a class-action lawsuit and shut these clowns down.

Bank of America is all kinds of suck. Seriously, get another bank.

@bravo369: good point.

I just got a parking ticket and found out if I pay with credit card, the city adds 10% as a convenience fee. Screw that too.

The original poster may actually want to "read" the T&C's of his credit card, there are a lot of things that are charged as cash advances. Even something as seemingly harmless as a lottery ticket is considered a cash advance by some companies.

Learn to read the stipulations of an agreement, before complaining about "changes" to said agreement, you may never have encountered a charge for a cash advance before, it doesn't mean that there aren't provisions in your T&C's stipulating which things are considered cash advance purchases.

...W...T...F...?

The card companies are slowly on a trend to count everything as a cash advance now, eh? What's next?

Are purchases going to be further subdivided that some will be subject to an additional fee and won't be eligible for grace periods anymore too? Bullsh*t.

@Dead Wrestlers Society: Agreed. Too bad they have a near monopoly in some places (saw for myself in Boston)

The city adding that 10% is their way of passing the cost of processing credit cards to you, plus some profit for the processing company.

And your issuer can double dip by charging another percentage as a cash advance fee, plus even more percentage as a cash advance interest rate (which isn't subject to grace periods!)

Credit Unions FTW!

Probably should have paid your parking tickets with pennies. BofA should have no problem selling you two or three thousand of them for the parking fine.

Well, the poster says it was a credit card, not a debit card. Certain things is against the law to pay using credit, lottery being one of them.

It's possible in this municipality, you cannot use credit to pay for a parking ticket, so THEY run it as a cash advance. It may be on BoA's end they just got a request for a cash advance, and they made no such decision like "oh this charge was for a parking ticket, so run it as a cash advance" (I doubt they can even do that), rather it was the municipality that charged it as a cash advance.

The poster should check with the municipality that he paid the ticket to in order to see if they process credit transactions as cash advances. The blame may lie with the municipality here, not BoA.

Municipal fines and the like are usually subject to the "cash advance" fee issue similar to the OP. The muni can not (often by law) lessen the fine (or, legally pay the processing fee for taking the card "out" of the total fine), so they can only be done via a cash-advance debit.

If the OP goes to muni website or parking enforcement office, I'll bet he'll see the disclaimer that fees paid by a cc or debitcard are subject to the added service charge per a city or state general law.

@KIRZEN2007: I didn't think it was legal to buy lottery tickets with a credit card at all, but considering them a cash advance makes a lot of sense. When you consider the number of people (especially seniors) who drop $20 or more a day on lottery tickets, imagine what it would be like if they could just charge it.

Just get a license plate like mine

[coolpl8z.com]

I get notices about parking tickets for OTHER vehicles all the time I don't have to pay b/c it's in error. Because of all the false positive parking tickets, I can use it as a defense on REAL parking tickets :P

@Scotus:

You can't buy lotto tickets with anything but cash or a winning lotto ticket for 'free ticket'. What's funny is H-E-B grocery stores gave me this coupon book that had a coupon for "free texas lotto ticket" I looked up the law and their coupon is a misdemeanor :X

@Pro-Pain: Don't let Buran hear you say that! :)

@KIRZEN2007: Blame the victim FTW!

@Scotus: all credit transactions have a small upfront set fee (like 35 cents)and like 2.5-3% of the transaction fee processing. SO that 1.00 dollar lottery ticket would only net the state less than 97 cents - the upfront fee.

So I'm guessing BOA had to reclassify the charge as a debit or cash fee so the state/municipality didn't take the fee hit. Same as the convience fee for paying your taxes by CC.

Isn't any check use a "form of cash advance," as it were? Or do they expect most non-gov'tal payees to never convert the check to money at some point?

I think that, for clarity, BofA should simply charge a Fee fee and be done with it.

Anyone need any OTHER reason to ditch BofA? Besides masochists?

Whoops, CC = check. Same difference, imaginary fees on BofA products.

@castlecraver: I don't think it's really blaming the victim. First of all I'm not sure that the OP is a victim of BoA, but rather the rules of the municipality.

Second of all I think it's a valid statement. A lot of people claim to have never been informed of a change to some policy or claim to have never been told of some given policy, but have in fact been told; they just didn't read it.

It does happen quite a lot. To be honest when people claim to have never been told of something, I'm not inclined to believe them. I'd understand that they may not have been aware of it, and I'd give them some leeway because of it - but now they know.

@Trai_Dep: I think there is a legal and regulatory difference between the two. For a cash advance, the CC gives YOU the money, for credit the CC gives the third party the money.

It may be that due to the rules of the municipality, the transaction must be treated as though the CC company gave you cash and then you handed the municipality the cash.

@Scotus: I once asked about this when a station surprisingly let me add the cost of a ticket to my CC bill (I had the $1 in my hand, not expecting that). The clerk said it's up to the store to set that policy. That was in MO.

Contact the DA. It would be wonderful poetic justice for BoA to get fined from the Government for them fining you for paying a ticket.

@KIRZEN2007: I can tell you for sure that in WA at least it is against the law to gamble with credit funds, and thus it would have to be processed as a cash advance.

@bonzombiekitty:

That's incorrect, Cash Advance can be any 'Cash' transaction using your card. For example if you send money on paypal to your mom you're technically supposed to choose the 'quasi-money' option, which WILL charge your card a cash advance since it's not a purchase.

I've paid speeding tickets with a credit card before. If there's no PIN, then it's not a cash advance? Only place to get a cash advance without a PIN is at the bank, isn't it?

I paid a ticket 2-3 months ago with my BofA visa via a onetime number (don't trust random merchants the city hires that I've never heard of). No fee. No convenience fee. Considering the vultures that are the St. Louis parking enforcement meter maids, I was shocked.

@KIRZEN2007:

"Even something as seemingly harmless as a lottery ticket is considered a cash advance by some companies."

I can't speak for other states, but in GA, merchants are not permitted to sell you lottery tickets of any kind if you pay with plastic. It doesn't matter if you're using credit or debit -- they can't do it.

@homerjay: It *is* getting old but I wouldn't have said a word if you hadn't.

Seriously, why do I get so much crap around here, when so many other people post exactly the same sorts of stuff I do?

Bank of America, Bank of opportunists.

I know I keep saying it, but I could write a paragraph blasting them and there policies, but why should I when those six words sum it all up.

Can't say I'm surprised. It's a bank. And of that already hard to trust subset, they are one of the worst.

Allow me to educate you. DO you read your fee disclosures? You'll probably find this line, I have it in mine: "Cash Equivalent transactions are defined as money orders, foreign currency, and travelers checks from a non-financial institution, person to person money transfers, bets, lottery tickets, casino gaming chips, fines and bail bonds."

I paid off my BofA CC and closed my bank accounts with them a couple months ago. They are a horrible bank.

I'm not one of those people who get OD fees and complain about paying them, then get mad at the bank. While their fees are horrible, I did not receive OD fees and such on any of the accounts. Even though I'm a signer on two other accounts and still had a CC at the time, when I closed my primary checking account they disabled my online access. This prevented me from reviewing the other accounts which I'm a signer on.

I closed my accounts with them them because of the horrible customer support hours, the horrible customer support, horrible web site uptime, horrible policies, and then they tried to increase my APR to something like 20% from the 15% I had. Pretty good credit rating, no late payments, no collections, I have two other CCs at mid balance (no more than $3k in total debt), a car loan which I've never been late on.

When I received the notice about the APR increase, I wrote a check for $950 to pay off the balance and closed it out. Closed out my checking and savings account, and went back to Washington Mutual. Not much better of a bank, but at least I'm still flagged as an employee in their systems, and my accounts will forever be marked. Plus, the 4.75% APY on the savings account from WaMu was a nice incentive. I put several thousands of dollars in there. The APY is still around 3.5%-- up around a good CD.

Just wondering, does ANYONE read their T&C of their credit cards anymore?

"A cash advance fee may be assessed when making the following types of transaction types: Check Cash Advances, ATM Transactions, Direct Deposit Cash Advances, Bank Cash Advances, Overdraft Protection Cash Advances, Purchase of Cash Equivalents"

"3 Cash Equivalent transactions are defined as money orders, foreign currency, and travelers checks from a non-financial institution, person to person money transfers, bets, lottery tickets, casino gaming chips, fines and bail bonds."

Being a good consumer also means reading the stuff you sign sometimes.

Waiting for the obligatory troll to come in here and say "Just don't drive a car", or some other sanctimonious nonsense...

@Buran: We only tease the ones we love. ;)

@balthisar:

And Casino's ;)

@differcult: But you actually did receive a cash advance, not some ephemerally-defined "cash equivalent" since the money you pulled from your credit card was deposited into a bank account with PennFed that you could (in theory) have turned around and withdrawn. @exkon: makes the point that the T&C of some unspecified card includes "fines" along with other reasonable items like casino gaming chips and money orders that are more negotiable.

The odd thing is the inclusion of fines, since they are NOT negotiable in the same sense. You can't pay a traffic ticket and then say "Oh, I'd like to cash that traffic ticket in for the money I just gave you" like you can with a chip at a casino, so at the root of it, it's the issuing back screwing you for the convenience of paying your parking or traffic fines with their card.

.

Be aware that once you do a "cash advance" on your B of A credit card, your APR automatically goes up to 24%.

@bonzombiekitty: Sure, I'll give you that. But I'm not convinced it's strictly a policy issue on the consumer's end. I think it's unlikely BoA (or any credit card issuer) can surmise the exact nature of the charge (whether or not it's a fine, lotto ticket, etc) on their own, and count on the entity originating the charge (the police dept) to put the charge through as a cash advance as opposed to a credit or debit. It's probably the case that the CC processing system that the police department uses requires them to put it through that way. That assumed, it would make more sense for the police department to put some kind of conspicuous notice on the ticket stub that any fines charged to a CC will be put through as a cash advance. Most CC holders are well aware that these transactions carry hefty fees, and no, most CC holders don't read that deep into the fine print. And honestly, how often would one have to pay fines or buy bail bonds enough to consider it might be a cash-equivalent transaction (moreso than say... purchasing postage stamps, gold, or paying taxes which could arguably be considered similarly cash-equivalent to a traffic fine, all of which you can do with a credit card without it being considered a cash advance)?

All I'd ask for is a little more explicit disclosure at the point of payment beyond the fine-print that you probably filed away long ago. I don't think it's really reasonable to expect your normal CC user to recall exceptions like that as they pertain to relatively rare and aggravated circumstances, especially when they can turn out to be so costly.

I must go to a very different Bank Of America than the OP, because my Bank Of America consistently issues Visas, and my online bill looks nothing at all like his.

Had this happen to me, as well. CSR explained that they informed customers of this in a mailing. He was happy to waive the fee when I asked.

This is yet another hyperbolic, missing-info story bashing BOA. I start to wonder if WaMu et al are hiring people to troll Consumerist with half-explained, bullshit stories.

People, when you try to convert your credit card to cash, that's called a cash advance. This includes using your CC to add money to another credit, bank, or other monetary account. Likewise is going to a participating bank and using your credit card to "buy" cash from them. Or using your CC in an ATM to get cash. Or using one of those CC checks.

What sort of BOA MC does Anthony have? Where does he live? Was it a municipal ticket or state ticket? If so, from where? Did the BOA rep actually say they charge fees on traffic tickets, or is that a connection that Anthony simply presumes as a result of the circumstances? Is it really BOA, or the ticketing authority, that caused it to be a cash advance transaction?

@akede2001: Why do you have "thousands of dollars" in a savings account, but maintain a $3000+ balnace on credit cards?

I pay parking tickets in NYC online with my Citibank debit card. Bank takes it out just fine. NYC adds a $2.00 convenience fee.

Just got one in the mail... Maybe I should mail them a check. That should be inconvenient for them and will save me $1.59 (since i have to pay for the stamp)

@homerjay: Awww, I didn't know you cared! ;)