Move Your Money Now!!!
Chase Manhattan Bank is EVIL. This week, they tried to charge me $297 due to one overdraft I accidentally made to my account, and the most I could convince them to remove in charges was $136 (they have a $70 credit back limit and I caught them in error on $66 of the overdraft charges). They still are demanding I give them $161 in fees for what amounted to a single transaction that caused me account to overdraft $106.48.
Basically what happened is I had about $200 in my Chase account and a few thousand dollars in my main USAA account. Over the weekend, I charged $80 to my Chase account in several small transactions. Sunday night, I paid a bunch of online bills through my USAA account, but one of them, a student loan account, I didn't realize had been set to take payments out of my Chase account by default (I was paying bills from my Chase account for a while this semester because my GI Bill money had been delayed for several months - irrelevant though).
So, Monday morning, that $250 transaction cleared first thing causing my account to have -$36. Then, all those other transactions started clearing - most of them on Monday, and most of them for under $2... and Chase charged me a $33 fee for every single one! NINE overdraft fees, total! I logged into my account Friday to see a negative $400 when I thought I had a positive $133 balance. Crazy, right?
So I called them, and they even explained to me that they PURPOSELY prioritize and clear large payments first because that is just how they do things. Then, they said they could ONLY credit me up to $70 in overdraft charges. Isn't that just completely bogus??
Going through the register, I noticed that Friday they also reversed charges on a $8.20 payment I made to Quizno's and a $1.97 payment I made to 7-Eleven (why they did that, I have no idea). At this point I was speaking to the highest level manager. So I convinced him to reverse the two $33 overdraft charges made for those transactions, but he wouldn't remove anything else.
This Tuesday, when the banks open, I'm going to march down there and deposit $106.48 that will cover the amount of money my account was short to begin with (not including the two charges they reversed - that's their issue), and I'm going to close my account. I used to be a WaMu customer, and so my account was just transferred to Chase - I never would have voluntarily signed up to bank with them in the first place!
Anyway, if they try to come after me for all these late fees, I'm just going to ask them to prove that I ever agreed to pay their late fee charges. At most, I'm willing to pay them one single late fee charge of $33 - but the rest is their fault because of how they choose to clear the transactions. If they cleared the transactions in the order they were made, I would have had a $133 balance when that single $253 charge was made, and I would have had one overdraft and one overdraft fee.
All this is to basically say: Fuck big banks.
You should stick it to the man too: http://moveyourmoney.info/
January 19th, 2010 - 09:49
Yeah, they did the same thing to me. Yes, it is organized robbery to process payments biggest to smallest like that. It is done for no other reason than to maximize chargebacks. It is basically fraud.
Like they said, “the best way to rob a bank is to own one.”
Of course, if the massive bailout crimes of last year didn’t clearly illuminate this, I doubt $253 today will.
I had the exact same situation with LaSalle. I told them to get bent. They called a collection agency and put a default on my credit report – to go along with the others from hospital bills that student insurance decided they didn’t want to cover and bogus traffic tickets. All to prevent me from getting a mortgage, or to live conveniently in the US plantation. Good luck, assholes.