We don’t want to admit it, but most of us have done it before. We’ve misjudged how much money was in our checking accounts, leading to a cascade of overdraft fees. It happened to Bob: he used his Bank of America debit card for each transaction during a night out and was hit with a total of $245 in fees. Sure, he could have taken the fees as an expensive lesson, but he chose to fight back instead. [More]
cascading overdrafts
Zombie Wells Fargo Account Rises From Dead, Collects Overdraft Fees
By 3.29.11
Leigh thought that she had laid her Wells Fargo checking account to rest. It was closed, gone, out of her life forever. When some forgotten auto-payments hit the account, though, instead of rejecting the payments, the bank zombified the account, brought it back to life, and charged Leigh and her husband a $35 overdraft fee for each item that hit their account. Wells Fargo put them on a payment plan to repay their balance, then turned around and sent the account to collections less than a month into the agreed-upon payment plan. Now they’ve been flagged as overdrafters in the Chexsystems database, and are still watching the account to make sure that no erroneous auto-payments hit it and trigger more overdrafts. [More]
