Thread: And so it begins. Are you prepared?

Yeah bofa got hit with that law suit as well.

Originally Posted by MaFioSo

I see your point, it just seems unethical and borderline fraudulent. They issue X fee. . ., well you didn't pay X fee in 3 days, so here's another fee for not paying the fee. If I remember correctly, WellsFargo had to pay out around $250 million for deliberately setting up their debit card processing in a way that would increase the amount of over drafts. I'm not sure if BoA does this, but with WellsFargo, if you had a series of pending transactions, they would withdraw the largest transaction first, as opposed to withdrawing them in the order they were charged.

Most banks do that, including the last one I worked for. The reasoning behind it is that the overwhelming majority of the time, the largest bills are the most important, the ones that most need to be paid. That order is set for all customers, whether they have overdraft protection or not. And if one doesn't have overdraft protection, and their car note goes unpaid because of a pack of gum, someone's gonna be pissed off.

Whether the increase in fees from that payment order is sinister, or merely a side-effect depends on your point of view. Personally I'd say the truth is somewhere in between. Banks know these days that for the majority of account types (checking, savings, even money markets), it's ridiculously easy to lose a customer to competition, simply because there's now so much competition. They also know that if they piss off too many people, it'll hurt their bottom line....so while these banks didn't completely disregard the financial benefit they'd see from the fees when they decided on the order in which to process transactions, I also don't think it was the largest factor.

~Morningfrost