Wood & Huston Bank's customers well know the bank's policy that all transactions submitted after 2 P.M. Will not be processed until the next day. It has been posted as a warning on their drive-up windows for years. Apparently they recently changed it without bothering to tell anyone.
On 9-22-09 I deposited my paycheck at Wood & Huston in Cape Girardeau, MO. It was 3:30 P.M. So I knew it would not be credited to my account until the following day. I also expected that the 4 payments I made on Paypal at 4:30 P.M. That day using my VISA check card as a credit card would not be posted until the following day - especially since I had been told twice recently by two separate bank employees that using it that way delayed the transaction by a day and also because I had been using it on Paypal extensively for the past 3 or 4 months and these transactions consistently took 2 or 3 days to clear my account. Imagine my surprise when I found that Wood & Huston had picked up those 4 payments on 9-22-09 and charged me 4 NSF fees on them totaling $96! When I called the bank to find out what was going on, I was informed that the cutoff time for processing debit card transactions was 6 P.M. Rather than 2 P.M., that this has "ALWAYS" been true of debit card transactions, and that using my debit card as a credit card did NOT affect the processing time at all. It's interesting that the payments I made in the days following 9-22-09 again took 2 days to clear my account. But on 9-22-09 they apparently only took 90 minutes. Or could it be that only the fact that they could charge me for bogus overdraft fees on those 4 transactions caused the transactions to "clear" my account so quickly? Dare I accuse the bank of 'cherry-picking' transactions on some report for the purpose of charging fees, claiming they had cleared when in reality they had NOT?
Wood & Huston Bank has apparently made some change in the way they process debit card transactions without telling anyone. They have removed from their drive-up windows the placard stating the 2 P.M. Cutoff time since it now seems to apply only to customer deposits, not to any debit transactions. I'm going to let the Attorney General's Office decide this as I have filed a complaint against Wood & Huston Bank for unethical and dishonest business practices. I urge all other bank customers everywhere to follow suit when their banks rob them with bogus fees! It's a real shame when the very people we trust to protect our money decide their profit line is more important than their honesty and integrity. I think we'd all do better to revert to a cash only life-style and give these bankers aka CROOKS the boot!
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