In December my boyfriend and I opened two separate accounts at the Hopewell Branch of BB&T. In January Mike paid the mortgage on a house we are selling in Ohio. His check was direct deposited from the government. They bounced our mortgage payment and sent it back.
We have never even paid any payments late before this. The following month they did the same thing. They told us the money takes up to five days to clear from his direct deposit. It cost him $240.00 each time they did this.
In late March my daughter went to Basic Training for the National Guard, and I'm taking care of her then 8-month-old baby. The Army told us we both have to be on an account because of this, so I added her to my account at BB&T.
On June 27 BB&T showed that we were overdrawn and charged us for 4 Overdraft Fees. Then another transaction came through and they charged us another $35.00, totaling $175.00 in Overdraft Fees. I didn't think anything of it and just subtracted out the fees, assuming they were right.
On July 7 BB&T showed us to be overdrawn again by $563.79. On July 8 I called BB&T to question this, and they told me I had to go to the original bank that opened my account to investigate this.
On July 11 I went into the Hopewell Branch of BB&T to ask them about this. The account supervisor printed off a sheet of paper (account transaction sheet) and we started going over this with my copy of my online account and my checkbook.
When I pointed out that they took out too much money in fees according to all three sets of papers, she told me that you cannot go by any of the papers we had. She proceeded to print off different sets of papers until she finally found the papers that showed the fees they were charging me.
When I asked why they would bounce something on July 3 when my daughter had just been paid over $1000.00 on the first and nothing was spent until the third, she printed off another paper (reconcilement journal). It showed a beginning balance of $868.12 (after they deducted their fees from June 27), memo holds of $479.02, and transaction activities of $463.00, leaving a negative balance of $73.90. But then they did a holds adjustment of $479.02, giving me a positive balance after they bounced my account.
When I asked her what the memo holds were, she said they were transactions that were done but had not cleared the account yet. I told her there was nothing pending before July 3 and that we never used our cards because of the fees from the week before. I asked her to print off the holds so we could see them. She tried to do that but couldn't find them.
She started giving me excuses for why the money was held and then put back in after the fees were accrued. I told her I wanted to see them, and that I still didn't understand how the account could go negative right after the deposit that cleared up the original fees. She said she would have to get someone else to talk to me because she obviously couldn't help me.
The whole time she was "supposed" to be helping me understand, she was talking down to me and making me feel stupid. She never did get someone else to try to help me understand what was going on. She then told me that I should never have let my daughter have an ATM card because she was too irresponsible and too young to use it properly.
Now my daughter is 18 years old with a baby who is almost a year old, and she's in another state doing Basic Training. My daughter is old enough to fight for that woman's freedom but not to use an ATM card! Anyway, by this point I was mad, so I asked her for the paperwork to take home with me so I could review it and see where I went wrong.
My boyfriend and I sat down that night and went over everything. We found other discrepancies causing more fees to be accrued. A couple of days later my boyfriend went into the bank with me to try to get this resolved. We started out by talking to the same woman I was talking to before. Then the bank manager came over and asked us if she could help us in her office.
The original woman and the bank manager went off and started talking really quietly together before she came to "help" us. The manager had an attitude from the beginning. She didn't help us at all. She accused my boyfriend of yelling at her when he had not, telling us she was not going to discuss anything with us anymore.
Really long story made a tad bit shorter, there was nothing they would do. This is the bank's stand on their policies:
1. The ATM balance receipt, the 24-hour phone balance, and the online service are not reliable, and you cannot go by what they say.
2. The bank can do whatever they want and charge whatever they want, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
3. If we don't like it, we can go somewhere else.
Now I will be going somewhere else as soon as my daughter gets home. I can't close the account until she is here so she can be put on another account with me.
There has got to be something we can do. I'm not willing to let this go. My daughter is busting her butt to earn that money and now she can't even spend it because BB&T is taking it all away from her. I don't mind fees that we have actually earned, but they charged a total of $690.00 in fees when it should only have been $245.00 at the most.
One more thing: I asked them why they never declined the cards if we were overdrawn, and they told me it was a courtesy to us. Thanks a lot... I don't view that as a courtesy, I view that as robbery.
Thanks for letting me rant and rave. If anyone knows who I can contact to report this to an agency, please let me know. There has got to be someone that keeps banks in check. Oh yeah, I'm also going to see if any of the news stations will be able to look into this. Maybe we can reach people who don't have a computer or bring it to a lot of other people's attention so this doesn't happen to anyone else.
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