Citizens Bank charged $74 in overdraft fees for a $35 recurring item that was presented against a balance of $27.98, a $7.02 overdraft. That is a 1,054% transaction fee!
The $35 item should not have even been honored in the first place, because it was for a debit transaction on a card that had been canceled. Citizens Bank decided to drop MasterCard and forced me to switch to Visa, and I had started to use the Visa debit card weeks before. So the transaction should never have been honored.
When I explained all of this and that I wanted to have the charges taken off my account by two different members of Citizen Bank's call center group in Ashville, North Carolina, they said there is no way they would reverse the charges.
Both customer service people, Shauna Payne and Ryan Walkenshaw, identified themselves as "Supervisors." It appears that is part of Citizens’ strategy – everyone is a supervisor so there is no one available to transfer calls to. They each refused to let me talk to anyone else to escalate the situation.
The conversations were being recorded. They both said they would be happy to leave a message with someone to call me back, but there is no way that the overdraft fees would be waived by anyone at Citizens Bank.
I told them if they cannot get me a manager to speak with today, they need to put the funds back in the account today and we can resolve the issue when they call me back. I told them that I had made a deposit in the account to pay an important bill, and the $74 that they took out brought the balance down to a point where there is not enough to cover the payment. They both said that was not their problem.
Shauna Payne kept talking over everything I said. At the end of the call, she claimed she would transfer me to a manager's voice mail, and transferred me to a disconnected Verizon mobile phone.
I can't imagine how they can get away with this. Think twice before opening ANY account with Citizens Bank at this point!
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