Mea culpa, I said I was going to close my Charter One Accounts, but I didn't learn my lesson from prior bad problems with them, so I have no one but myself to blame for this latest nightmare, but hey, maybe if I note my experience, again, others will learn from my mistake.
This morning I checked my account and found it overdrawn to the tune of 22 bucks. I thought, how is this? All my stuff is accounted for, and I have 7 bucks left, where did I mess up? I checked and found a service charge, totally unexpected, and so I called, found out it was for 'over draft protection', which is an annual fee of 30 bucks to transfer money from my savings account to my checking account. Now, I will say that in and of itself is a rip off. Why would you charge someone a fee for a piece of code that links two accounts together? I write software for a living, it doesn't take much coding effort to do this, and yet Charter One thinks this is worth 30 bucks a year!!! Unreal. I call the bank and the manager on duty put the 30 bucks back and unlinks the accounts and apologizes for the misunderstanding.
Fast forward 4 hours and my account is now 70 bucks overdrawn? Huh??? I call back and get a stupid piece of garbage manager named GREG who gives me this self-righteous speech about paying for my mistakes. Say freaking WHAT? You shouldn't have taken my 30 bucks! And you know that and put it back and now you want to hit me for overdraft fees for a service charge you put back???
I told him I was going to file a complaint against him and Charter One, and I was going to close my account and email bomb every charter one and citizens bank executive I could find, but he didn't care and wouldn't put my money back. The piece of crap little punk wouldn't budge.
Here's my problem with this. I had no idea that there was a fee for this 'over draft protection' with my own money in the first place! Not explained to me at all, or I wouldn't have signed up for it, I am too poor for that crap. Nor did i know it was 'increased', crap I didn't know it even existed. He gave me more garbage about how we sent you a notice, blah blah blah. I don't do anything via paper, my stuff is all internet, and the last notice I got from Charter One was a threat that they were going to switch my savings account to a non-interest bearing account because I was using it too much. I can't stand banks that just blithely help themselves to your money because it is in their bank. That's why banks are going under. They can't figure anything out anymore, and they pass the costs on to the small person.
So God only knows how much I am going to be overdrawn tomorrow, it will be bad no doubt, I had just enough money in there for the transactions coming in with 7 bucks to spare. NOTE - there was enough to cover what was coming in, but not to cover this mystery suprise charge.
Greg, it is my sincere hope that charter one demotes or fires you after this. I intend to encourage all my co-workers, family members, friends, and anyone else I can to take their business to NCB or to a credit union.
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