I Spent $94 And Was Stuck With Nearly $500 In Overdraft Fees

Max bunched together $94 worth of purchases with his Wells Fargo debit card that somehow racked up $480 in overdraft fees because he was dinged with a fee for each of his purchases. An Executive Email Carpet Bomb resulted in whittling $150 off the balance, but that still leaves a nasty $330 in fees hanging over Max’s head.

He writes:

Recently, I had a weekend where i expected to make several purchases on my debit card. In preparation for this, I transferred $320 from one checking account to the check card account, which i keep empty regularly in order to prevent fraud. This transfer Occurred on a Thursday at approximately 5 PM. I made a series of purchases over the weekend (Friday, Saturday) with the card, and spent about $270 dollars, or so I thought. When i went to the bank this morning, I found out the following. The transfer that occurred on Thursday didn’t post until the middle of the day on Friday, after I had already used the card several times resulting in a 35 dollar overdraft fee each time I used the card. This quickly cleaned out my $320, and subsequent purchases have pushed the account balance to -$571, which includes $480 in overdraft fees and $94 in purchases.

I’ve called Wells Fargo and escalated all the way up to a call center manager, to no avail. The best they’re willing to do is waive $150 in fees, still leaving me owing them $330. I’m a student with limited financial resources and I don’t just have $330 to give away to the bank. Is there any recourse? Executive office service wasn’t any help at all, the guy said he was the final decision and nobody could override him. I sent an EECB and am hoping to get a response to this soon. Needless to say they’ve lost me as a customer after this mess is cleared up, but is there anything I can do from this point?

Any advice for Max, other than to cancel his account as soon as he can dig himself out of the mess?

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