Amcore bank is involved in predatory and double charging for NSF fees. I recently have spoke with Amcore Bank about their practices when charging NSF fees and this is what I was told.
They clear the largest DEBIT first when clearing each nights transactions. (This causes more transactions to be cleared while your account is overdrawn, thus allowing them to charge for more NSF fees.) This in itself is predatory but I will explain this further. An example of this is when you have 5 transactions clearing in a night, they will clear the largest transaction first that will overdraw your account with the first transaction and then you will get 4 NSF fees charged. The legal way to clear these transactions is to clear them from smallest to largest. If this was the case they could clear the 4 transactions that are under your available balance and then the largest which would overdraw your account and then you would be charged 1 NSF fee for the larger transaction.
The other predatory practice that they are now involved in is double charging transactions that are pending and then clear. The example of this is when you have multiple transactions pending one day and clear in the following day while your account goes negative. Once it is negative a pre-authorization transaction for $15.34 incurs a fee and then when the actual amount clears at $16.00 they charge another fee. I recently have seen them charge $75.00 ($25.00 x 3) for 3 pending transactions on one day and then the following day when the transactions clear for the actual amounts (and the account was $75.00 further in the hole) they charge $93.00 ($31.00 x 3) for the same 3 transactions. (These two different NSF amounts are due to their 'tiering' of their over-the-limit structure. This is double charging customers for these three transactions and charging $168.00 for 3 transactions that only caused the account to be -$38.— prior to the fees. I understand that a bank needs to make money but this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Hope this helps people make better decisions on who you should give your business to when looking to allow someone to be your banker.
I have documented this with daily screen shots of what they did in both of these two examples.
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