I have never been much of a cynic but I am convinced of corporate malfeasance within Wachovia and its parent company Wells Fargo. Wachovia verbally misrepresented overdraft protection service to my wife such that she did not know she was signing up for it. And while many changes to joint checking transactions require authorization from both account holders, the addition of overdraft protection does not. Banks are very calculating when it comes to this sort of thing. They pretty much know how many millions they will make per annum based on various categories of consumer error.in this case, she and I were using our debit card and NOT encountering any rejections and so we erroneously assumed funds were available.in what amounts to organized theft, Wachovia / Wells Fargo took $1,000 of my money in overdraft fees, compromising our ability to make rent and outright nullifying our plans in month 8 of our pregnancy to purchase what we needed for the nursery.
I belong to a growing vulnerable population of Americans who have to live from paycheck to paycheck and who due to a health and divorce-related bankruptcy 2 years prior, do not have credit cards. And because there are two people on our account, the burden is on us to log every $2 slurpee and $4 mochha latte into QuickenBooks to ensure we don't incur overdraft fees. As a previous poster discussed, the information in the bank account is not accurate. The local 7-11 for example does not allow its customers to debit transactions, so I swipe my debit card and hit CREDIT. These charges, at least one a day, float in some ether for as long as 6-7 days before posting to the back-end of my account (i.E., in holdings).in fact there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when these charges to post, and I am inclined to think Wachovia / Wells Fargo is engaged in some manipulation and creative accounting to increase the odds customers like my wife and me will overdraft. So it's the poor who suffer. (It's interesting what counts as poor these days. I pull down an $86K salary and my wife an additional $40K but we cannot find rent in metro DC for less than $2K). We have no credit and our expenses consume close to 100% of our income so we have not been able to create a savings account. THIS is who Wachovia / Wells Fargo is profiting from. Bank VPs sending their kids to college on the backs of the hard-working poor.
Overdraft fees are self-perpetuating. Before we were even aware we had the service, we were in a hole. That means less of our direct deposited income was available to us the following week which in turn caused more overdraft fees. I realized I had to bite the bullet and cancel the service even at the risk of bouncing a check or two, and I did so in spite of the fact the representative at Wachovia Central pleaded with me not to do so, ostensibly for my own sake (har har).
Wachovia gets away with this for two reasons: (1) the poor people who are adversely impacted by its malfeasance are often not educated enough to articulate their case against the bank and (2) people in general are usually too embarrassed to call attention to their indigence. But until they do, they will continue to be the exploited population. It's not the wealthy who are losing money or sleep over this. Their money is earning interest. Your money and mine is going into the college funds the bank VP set up for his four kids.
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