This bank has a consistent practice of not crediting deposits into a checking accounts until the last entry, while always deducting ATM and checks charges first.
A deposit can be made after 2pm on Friday and it will not be credited to your checking acct. Until sometime during the next business day which would be Monday. However, any cash withdrawals from ATM machines, automatic withdrawals or presented checks that arrive during that period from 2pm Friday until late Monday will be deducted from any prior balance.
They disregard the deposit that was made until last. They know it was made (there is an electronic entry when you deposit funds) and they know that deducting any and all charges first has a good chance of creating overdrafts. Allowing them to charge and deduct an excessive amount of money ($33.00 per item) from your account. They control when deposits and deductions are shown.
They also will do as follows:
If you have $700.00 in your acct. And they receive six checks for payment and the six checks are as follow:
Check #1... $600.00
check #2... $ 99.00
check #3... $ 9.00
check #4... $ 8.00
check #5... $ 7.00
check #6... $ 6.00
They will deduct the amounts from checks #1 and #2 in the amount of $699.00 leaving $1.00 in your acct.
Then they will show checks #3,4, 5, and 6 as insufficient and debit your checking acct. $33.00 for each - one for a total of $132.00
In our case, they informed us that they paid the four checks that totaled $30.00, but charged our acct. $132.00 in overdraft charges.
We did not know any of this happened until we received a post card from the bank 6 days after all these transactions took place. 6 days? The Pony Express was faster then that. During that six days more charges were presented to the bank making our balance even further in arrears.
Had they deducted checks #2,3, 4,5, and 6 first there was more then sufficient funds to cover them. That would have left check #1 for $600.00 which would have overdrawn our acct.By $29.00. That would have resulted in one (1) overdraft charge of $33.00.
This is a consistent practice. I believe this to be, if not criminal, then immoral at best.
The other charges that were presented for payment during the 6 days it took a post card to get to us would have been covered by a deposit that had been made, but the charges plus the $132. Overdraft charges were more then enough to keep us in the red - allowing them to hit us again for overdraft charges.
This practice had been occuring for years, but this time we decided to close the checking acct. And open one at another bank.
We had been with this bank when it was First Star and prior to that Mercantile and prior to that Mid-American bank (21 years)
Although we closed the acct. Almost two months ago we are still receiving notices of more charges being added. We have gone from a customer who had an average daily balance in excess of $2000.00, to someone who is now being billed for $822.91 the majority of which is overdraft charges.
I know this is happening to others. This is an outrage. It is criminal - and I don't really care what any jurist might say - these people, these "people we trust to hold our money" have no right to plunder or pillage that with which we have trusted them.
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