Fifth Third
Bank blatantly taking advantage of customers with overdraft charges

I know that there are already a ton of these kind of rants, but I need to put in my two cents. I would love to see some of the banking employees try to defend what happened to me. Fifth Third's policies are to "hold" pending transactions before ever taking out the transactions that actually "post" to an individuals account. Their reasoning is that they have make sure that your account has enough funds to cover all charges.

First of all if you look up the definition of "pending" in just about any dictionary it is defined as "waiting to happen, still to come, will eventually come to be" So why do pending transactions take precedence over the ones that post and need to be paid out that day. On that note I had about $400 in my account and I bought a money order for $250. There was some kind of problem when I swiped my debit card and I had to swipe it again, so there ended up being 2 pending transactions for $250 that appeared on my account.

The next day 4 debits from the previous days totaling about $125 posted to my account. Fifth Third put a hold on my account for the 2 money order charges first, which put my account in the negative, then charged me an overdraft fee for each of the 4 that posted that day totaling $132 in charges. I went into my local branch and explained the situation to the branch manager. I told him that one of the $250 was going to fall off because it was an error and I didn't overdraw my account. He told me to come back in a few days and talk to him again after the charge was dropped.

When the money order charge posted to my account, sure enough only one went through and other simply dropped off. I went back to the bank to get my fees reversed because they were charged to my account even though I never overdrafted. The manager told me that he was not able to give me back my fees and he understood why I would feel that I was being ripped off, but that is Fifth Third's policy and he could do nothing about it, and all banks have the same policies. All he would "recommend" is I should open a savings account and get overdraft protection.

Now why would I give more of my hard earned money to someone that is stealing from me I said. He didn't have a response to that. Needless to say I closed out my account that day, and no one at the bank seemed to care that they were losing a customer, even though it was totally their fault. I had many more of situations like this before with this bank, but this is the one broke the camel's back. I changed to Woodforest National bank and haven't had any of the problems or disrespect like I did with Fifth Third.

It drives me nuts that the banks have stolen everyone's money and wasted it and now there is no more to take from us directly, so they are taking more of OUR money from the government in the form of a bailout. We need to stand up against these crooks and make them pay for their greed.

Company: Fifth Third
Country: USA
State: Ohio
City: Columbus
Address: Henderson Road

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