BB&t has taken hundreds of dollars in fees while my account maintained a positive balance. My wife opened a direct deposit account with BB&t in february. When we opened the account, the representative promised us overdraft protection among many other features. The first negative balance was made when BB&T admittedly botched the deposits in june of 07. They swore that the fees were credited to the account, but they in fact, never were. After getting the runaround for several months, in many cases the tellers would become very rude, intimidating my wife with the threat of having her arrested for the unpaid fees, if she decided to have her money transferred elsewhere. Eventually, the bank simply contested that it had been too long since the transactions were botched, and no longer were required to do anything about them.
When asked why our overdraft protection was not enacted, we were given the story that we were approved, but the people upstairs had not recieived the credit application that we never knew we had to fill out Later on, our account would show that multiple overdraft fees would put the account in the negative by less than the amount as a single overdraft fee.
They later claimed that it was because money for a pizza transaction made months earlier was not posted, even though the money had been taken out. Funny thing is, that it did not even show up on my statements, so my account was always showing (even on the detailed statement I got from the bank as having a positive balance at the time these overdrafts were taken. On top of that transactions were being held until the balance would reach a negative balance (usually under a dollar), whereas BB&t no longer chooses to distinguish which transaction forced the account negative, and bounces all transactions for that day. A situation where no more than a single possible transaction would have bounced, was resulting in ten or more overdraft fees, all the while my account, and statements were showing a positive balance (except for the hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees) Thanks to the ghost pizza from 3 months before making my account appear to have $20 more than it had.
We finally got them to refund half of some of the overdraft fees for a single week, totalling something like $70. That week, over 20 transactions were held until the 19th of december (several of them having been made as early as november) so as to bounce all of them when the account went $2.63 in the negative. A grand total of over $600 (about what my wife makes in 2weeks) gone in a single gas transaction.
Theoretically, it could be my fault for not keeping as accurate records as I should have during the opening months of the account (in which I bought the ghost pizza that started it all, and my wife being easily run out by a teller that told her that it was her fault because the overdraft resulting from BB&T botching payroll had been corrected, (when in fact it hadn't). When the checks started to bounce, I balanced my account to a previous statement, and continued from there, so as to get my balance in sync with that of the bank, but the pizza never showed up, and still doesn't to this day.
BB&T has since deducted the mystery pizza from my balance (after about 4 months of it mysteriously floating in cyberspace) so as to prevent it from further upsetting my bank balance, but have done the same thing with approximately 50$ in mystery transactions one of which being a 34$ gas purchase according to my records.
In my opinion, this is a ploy by BB&T to mislead customers into thinking that they have more money in the account than they, in reality actually have, so as to cause them to overdraft their account, so that BB&t can run massive numbers of transactions through the account, while the money is not there to cover it.
I may be partially to blame for spending money that I, in fact, did not have, but after several months of the bank telling you that the money is there, you tend to forget that it, in fact, is not. Also holding every transaction for a two week time frame, then running them all through on the same day when the account is less than $3 from covering them all, and then charging $35 for every single one regardless of whether the money would have covered all but one of them or not is a joke.
If I had done this in any other form of business, I would be in jail for fraud. Starting with the fact that you can not promise somebody anything, and not deliver, to the fact that any business has to balance their books quarterly. Also if I threaten to have you jailed for anything, that is a direct threat "aka" blackmale. Furthermore, if I buy 300 items from a store, write a check for each item, and one turns out to be bad one day, the clerk cannot charge me a returned check fee for even the checks that cleared.
Bassheadkrakka
dudley, North Carolina
U.S.A.
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