Bank of America Complaint - Check Card and NSF Fees - Check Card NSF Fees

Posted by CrazyRedHead on 2005-08-13:

Sounds like you don't know how to manage a checkbook. You should write the transaction at the time it happens not after you have spent all of your money. Don't rely on the online banking system or the telephone system to give you an accurate telling of your balance. I learned this the hard way. You need a class on how to manage your checkbook the right way.

Posted by miantani75 on 2005-08-13:

Um, they send you a statement every month. Dont' you bother balancing it when it arrives? Probably not. You goofed up your account & now you expect the bank to pay for you mistake. Silly, silly customers. You never learn, do you?

Posted by miantani75 on 2005-08-13:

That s/b YOUR mistake.

Posted by CB Baby on 2005-08-14:

You really expected sympathy from anyone here reading your plight? YOU and YOU alone have to be responsible for making sure funds are in your account BEFORE you perform a transaction. Key word...RESPONSBILITIY! Did you or did you not learn how to add and subtract in elementary school?

Posted by QContinuum178 on 2005-08-17:

You need to enter your debits in your checkbook when you make them and consider them gone. It's irresponsible record keeping to write them down only after they've cleared the bank and still keep spending money in the interim.

Posted by DavidD on 2005-09-21:

Oooh, I'm feeling a bit outnumbered here being the only non-BofA employee posting a follow-up on this one. There they go again with that "check register" jargin. Working at a bank, you'd think they'd know that check use is all but gone these days (ask a merchant how many checks he gets as opposed to what he used to get). Therefore almost no one carries a check book anymore. Hence, no check register. Try this... Pretend you are not a current BofA customer and inquire about online services. They will tell you it does everything you can imagine for you. But they never tell you it can't keep a register for you. Then when they start their adjusting of your transactions to confuse you into paying them fees, hey, it's your fault because a manual check register could've done what their online services can't!
Thanks for exposing their posting-unposting scam here. It's their biggest income source! You didn't really think online banking was "FREE" did you?

Posted by jestep on 2005-10-23:

While I do see the irresponsibility in the claim, I work for a credit card processing company and I know the way the system works. BOA knows that you dont have the money, and they intentionally allow you to make the purchase so that they can collect an overdraft fee. WAMU and most other banks are the same. In my opinion it is a crime, but the FTC does't have the ability to regulate corporate computer programs like this. Banking computer systems are designed to get the most mney from their customers as possible. Everything is processed favoring th bank.

The only advice I can give, is get rid of BOA, they're the worst anyway, and watch your account better.

Posted by kingmd75 on 2005-11-19:

Hey, I bank with BOA and I don't understand how some of you are suggesting that the bank is deliberately allowing people to spend money they ought to know they don't have. Yes, to the OP, the pending transactions do disappear from the pending transaction section, AFTER they drop down to the Posted transaction section. I use the online banking to balance my checkbook and have never had a problem with it. Except my own errors of forgetting to right debit purchases down. Why would anyone think online banking means you don't need to keep a manual check register? They give you one with your new checks when you sign up for an account. They shouldn't have to hold your hands and teach you how to balance it.

Posted by blaze1234 on 2005-12-23:

I agree that BofA is intentionally making money with their online "Houdini" tricks. Most transactions (excluding online/mail order) appear in 'pending' immediately. Most will then drop into the statement after a day or so. However, some will disappear from the statement completely, only to go directly into the statement a few days to a week later.
I pretty much keep a tight lid on my BofA account and it's balance. I firmly believe in keeping the check register up-to-date. I get into trouble with buying gas. Since the price of gas has gone up, gas stations are slow about refilling the receipt paper in the pumps. I'm not always able to go inside to have one printed. I usually make a note, sometimes I don't. BofA makes the transaction disappear. In short, I end up believing I have $35 more then reality. If I make 7 $5 purchases, they bill me $35 for each purchase - that's a $245 fee!!
I spoke with several reps at BofA about why this happens. I got a "big bank" answer. Basically they say with gas stations they are only required to put it under 'pending' for a couple of days. After that, they *DO NOT HAVE TO* keep it listed. And "No, we will not (and do not) refund our fees."
I believe BofA has the ability to keep purchases in the pending section until posting. I firmly believe they are banking on customers forgeting purchases in order to charge fees. This should be illegal to the highest degree. If they made $245 on a $35 loan it would be a crime.

Posted by sweetpineapplekitten on 2006-01-10:

I agree with you 100%! They got me too with that 31.00 NSF!

Posted by peteo on 2006-01-20:

BOA is the worst bank I have ever dealt with. Never once had a problem with fleet or bank boston, but nothing but problems BOA. They seem to love to fool around with debt charges, removing them from your account and them posting them days later to get you to over draft. I cant seem to get any one there to tell me how long their "holds" last. Some BOA employees say 24 hours and then just this week they are now saying 3 days because a law changed. With fleet the "hold" would never come off unless you called fleet up and asked it to be taken off or a large amount of time passed ( couple of weeks). Now I only write 1 Check a month so I do not keep a ledger and rely on atms/online banking to tell me my balance (just like their AD's suggest you can do) So here's what can happen to you if you have a BOA account (which I believe is totally Un-ethical if not illegal) You have lets say $700 in your account. you write a check out the 1st of the month for rent for $600. SO you know you have $100 to spend. over the next week you spend $100. But your account still shows $680 dollars left because 4 of the transactions "dropped" off and disappeared from your account. You check online and atm and you think you really have some money left. So you go spend $10 of it. Then next day you look at your account. The check comes in along with the 4 charges that got dropped off. Now here comes the fun part:
You noticed that your check bounced why? because the bank put all if the money you had in your account towards the check and there was no money left for the 4 "dropped off" charges. so they charged you 4 x $31 = 124 in FEES. so that makes it so you do not have enough money in your account to cover the check. Yes this happened to me.My balance went to -a negative amount. The next day they returned the check and charged me an overdraft fee for the check even thought they didn't cover it!! So i was out was 155 dollars plus a bounced check all for being over $10 which I would not have been if BOA held the money to cover my transactions that they approved and took off for whatever reason.
So you can see why I think BOA are crooks.

Posted by zing on 2006-09-14:

I too am just being ripped off by BofA. Have to find another bank, once I am through this saga. I deposited some checks last Friday evening in an ATM, and when I checked my account online on Tuesday evening, the funds were already available, and posted to my balance (the "pending transactions" were empty). So I went to the bank, and had the bank manager do a wire transfer that I was planning to do after the checks had cleared (the amount of the WT was about 75% of the amount from the checks). The bank manager checked my account, verified that the funds were "available", and sent the wire transfer through.

To my chagrin, the next day, I see that they are showing a negative balance. AFTER the bank manager had sent out the wire transfer, the bank then put the checks on "hold", after previously declaring them as "available" and posted to my balance. And they claim that the checks will be cleared only next Wed (i.e., 1.5 weeks, in this age of electronic checking). Till then, I am bracing for bounced checks, OD fees, bounded check fees from other institutions, and a big mess.

BofA customer service, as well as the same bank manager who processed the wire transfer (even she had no inkling that the checks were not yet cleared), now refuse to help me on this, since I went ahead with the WT only since their database showed the funds as "available". They offer to refund the OD fees later, after they will be posted to my account, but no means to expedite the check clearance, so that I can be out of this hole with minimum damage. Instead they want me to take a cash advance from my credit card, and slap me with the big cash advance fees and finance charges.

Posted by robwolf100 on 2006-09-21:

You are absolutely right - Bank of America does make it deliberately deceptive. I had Washington Mutual previously and all transaction were posted immediately - debits, transfers, bill pays - and you could easily manage your account using only their online banking. Bank of America is totally different: all debits, transfers, and bill pays are posted as pending, usually for a day or so, and then there is ALWAYS a period of anywhere from 12 to 24 hours where transactions are not listed AT ALL: not as pending and not as posted - they are not visible.

What it means is that the online banking system of B of A is useless for managing your account, you are forced to use some sort of other register, be it Quicken or a piece of paper. Bank of America could easily make the online system real-time and useful, I know, because Washington Mutual is able to do it. There can only be one reason that BofA does it this way, and that is to deceive people who don't keep separate registers (I do now, because I have to, I didn't have to with WaMu) for the purpose of generating bank fees. There can be no other reason! If there is a legitimate reason, someone please enlighten me - don't say I should have kept my own register: of course with BofA I must, and I do.

Explain to me why WaMu is able to make it realtime, but BofA can't seem to.

Another plus of Washington Mutual: online bill payments funds are immediately removed from your account and then sent to the payee as a check from a Washington Mutual bank's own account. BofA, when it cuts a check to mail with billpay leaves you responsible for the check until the payee cashes it - again, for no other reason than to generate NSF and overdraft fees based either on a customer's carelessness with their balance or the intenional confusion generated by their online system. I started getting messages like "check #5004 was sent to so-and-so" when I didn't even know I had checks in that range.

Bank of America could easily make things less confusing and clearer, and they could change the way their system operates; again, I know they can, because I've seen Washington Mutual do it; however, they don't, for the purpose of generating fees.

Those of you who are responding by saying "you should keep your own register" are missing the true nature of the complaint here.

(the reason i don't have a wamu account, as you can tell I prefer them, is that they aren't in this state)

Posted by Miss Mom on 2007-11-20:

BOA is nothing but a big crook. I'm searching for another bank now. I understand the whole NSF deal and know that when I overdraw my account, I should be charged a fee. However, BOA likes to rob you blind with their so-called pending status on transactions. My husband and I share an account and he is currently stationed in Korea. Checking your account online gives you no real clue to what your balance really is. Say you have 35.00 in your account and you need to pay a 75.00 bill. You think okay, I will eat the NSF fee and go over to get this paid. WRONG! You bought a 10.00 lunch yesterday? Spent 5.00 at the corner store 2 days ago? They're gonna push those smaller transactions to the back, so they can hit you with 3 NSF fees instead of one. Then when you call them about it, they give you the song and dance about pending and how they pay the bigger transactions first to make sure your important bills are being paid. How the hell do they know whats more important?? It is truly beyond me that no one has filed suit against these people. I am searching for another good bank now. NSF fees are one thing, but highway robbery is another and these people are CROOKS!

Posted by spacepenguin on 2008-10-14:

I'm a web programmer and I work with credit card gateways regularly. Most gateways have a few options on how to capture funds. There is an "Authorize", where it simply asks the bank if you have the funds. The bank checks, and answers yes or no right then. The merchant then has up to 30 days to actually "capture" your funds. There is also an "Auth_Capture" function that immediately authorizes the funds, then the merchant captures the funds that night.

It's illegal in a lot of states to bill for a product before you ship it, but the majority of online merchants use auth_capture anyway. Some merchants authorize the funds (causing your bank to take the funds out of pending) and don't actually capture the funds for some time. Your bank has no way of knowing that the funds will actually be captured or not at the time of authorization. Different banks have different policies on how long to hold authorized funds before they remove them from the list. Bank of America is roughly 48 hours if I recall.

Posted by Greg78 on 2009-04-07:

!!!!!!!A CLASS ACTION SUIT IS NEEDED NOW!!!!!!
BoA plays what I call the "Pending Game". They leave deposits and withdrawals in a pending status until it benefits them. They move items from pending to cleared and back again as they see fit! The tricky part is that the overall balance reflects deposits that are in a pending status. If the money is not there or is "pending", why does the balance tell you it is there? There are more details to these shady practices and BoA is not the only one doing this. The Government has yet to step up to the plate! Barney Frank and the Financial Services Committee have done nothing! Who will defend and represent the people? We'll have to do it ourselves. It's time to elect a congress independent of major party and corporation influence!

Posted by Horace Redhaus on 2009-07-28:

I balance my checkbook diligently but I have noticed the same thing. For DAYS my account according to the online banking site showed $85.60 when it was in fact less than half that by my register. I kind of tend to think they are in fact trying to trip you up by design. Even though it is unscrupulous they are still within the bounds of the law to do so, for now. You have to keep your own register updated and accurate. I've come to regard the online banking site as entirely useless. Banks exist to absorb wealth. They will do anything and everything within the bounds of the law to get your money. That's the #1 thing you have to keep in mind. They are useful to an extent but one keeps in mind they are the enemy.

Posted by KenPopcorn on 2009-07-28:

Horace, you point out EXACTLY the reason to keep a register. You have no way (otherwise) of knowing that a check may not have cleared yet, or that a merchant may not have submitted debits for clearing. If you didn't have a register to tell you better, you'd think you could spend that money. If people like the poster above you could grasp this concept, they wouldn't be making inane calls for a class action suit.