savings accounts
If you participate in an automatic savings program like
Bank of America's
Keep the Change service, where debit card purchases are rounded up and the difference is deposited into your savings account, keep an eye on
maintenance fees. James says he was hit with a $5 charge last month because he hadn't met the minimum monthly deposit requirement of $25: "It turns out that I wasn't even accruing $5 worth of change per month, so I was losing more money due to the maintenance fee than I was saving via Keep the Change!"
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overdraft fees
Bank of America got so fee crazy last week that it applied a $10 overdraft fee to Christopher's account even though it wasn't overdrafted. I went back and forth with Christopher to try to figure out what BoA could have done to trigger this, but as you can see from the screen cap below, he only had two debits on the day of the event.
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hello, I'm crazy
Dalton Chiscolm has sued
Bank of America and its board, and wants
"1,784 billion, trillion dollars" in return for being subjected to what the judge describes as "inconsistent information from a 'Spanish womn' [sic]" as well as allegedly misrouted checks. In addition, Chiscolm wants another $200,164,000 in damages. We're not sure why that amount is separate, but who knows how a mind like Chiscolm's works?
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investigations
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office is gathering information in order to file fraud charges against some BoA executives over what they knew, and what they hid, when they acquired
Merrill Lynch & Co. a year ago. Earlier this week, his office
subpoenaed 5 board members to find out "what they knew regarding the mounting losses and bonus payments at Merrill before the deal closed on Jan. 1 and what role they played in deciding whether to disclose that information to shareholders," according to the Associated Press.
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bank of america
After stranding reader Shannon in Siberia with no functioning ATM card,
Bank of America has reached out to her and made up for the situation. Sort of. A new card was immediately dispatched, but the corresponding PIN didn't show up until five days later. She did, however, receive a $100 Amazon gift card for her inconvenience.
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updates
After reading about how Jesse was
banned for life from Bank of America for no clear reason, other readers wrote in with similarly bizarre BoA stories. Wayne was locked out of his new account after he opened it and charged a $75 overdraft fee. Chris was sent checks linked to a duplicate account and then charged penalties when the checks bounced. Edward's new account was closed but the CSR refused to tell him why, and he was charged a $60 "research fee" for the closing. When Edward went to a BoA branch to clear things up, he says the employee there told him, "That's why you don't open up accounts online."
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success stories
Bank of America messed up Andy's credit score by failing to send him credit card statements or giving him online access to an old account he only recently started using again. They also refused to work with him over the phone, telling him each time he called that they had no record of his previous conversations with customer service and therefore no reason to believe him.
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wcia 2009
Here we go people: It's the
Final Countdown. Let's hear it for the last four companies standing.
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bank of america
Last week Bank of America decided to hike rates on millions of credit card customers. They said that if you carry a balance and have an interest rate below 10%, starting in June you're likely to see it spike into the double-digit category.
BoA said it had to do it because these customers were "underpriced relative to market conditions." But according to at least one email,
Bank of America might be underrepresenting the number of customers caught in its interest rate dragnet...
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bank of america
Bank of America doesn't think cashing checks drawn on its own accounts is a service that should be free to no-name people who come in off the streets—they want $6 for that privilege, one reader recently discovered.
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