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Forum Post: banks

Posted 9 years ago on Oct. 5, 2014, 10:54 p.m. EST by elf3 (4203)
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http://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/1191-bofa-to-pay-410-million-overdraft-fee-class-action-settlement-/

In response to the banking overdraft account scams .. . we need to get back on discussion...Did banksters take your hard earned pay, play games with it, cost you something important ...perhaps a first date with a potential mate, groceries to feed your family, a pending home loan , or something worse ...cab fair for a job interview or to see sick or dying relative? The banks are preying on all of us but for the most vulnerable citizens who live paycheck to paycheck...they are creating a special misery for them. When will we stand together as a nation of citizens to say enough is enough!? Left right black white...we need to fight for what is ...yes in the midst of all the struggle and hardships we face we must worry that banks will take the money we entrust them with and find ways to scam fees off of it by arranging transactions as they please holding deposits and ruining the lives of our hard working citizens. I love the comment made by this particular poster below showing why we need to support each other and stay solid on this issue ...we must fight the banksters on ws!

.one citizen of the world to another –]Clay_Statue 30 points 12 months ago* Holy shit American banks are terrible. I live in Canada and there are exactly five big national banks and a couple of multi-nationals (CITI, HSBC, etc) on top of that. Canadian banking regulations are pretty decent. For example it is hard to get a mortgage in order to protect our banks from defaulters. Also nobody plays those games with your overdraft. None of our banks defaulted during the crisis of 2008 so we didn't get fucked with a bailout bill. The rules are blatantly stacked against you in the US on basically every level. Any asshole with enough capital can start their own bank. Anything resembling consumer protection or any notion of servicing the common good instantly becomes some socialist plot to undermine freedom. That is why your banks can steal your money. They wrote their own fucking laws and lobbied them onto the books. It makes me so angry I almost forget I'm Canadian. You dudes have been getting screwed so badly by all the institutions that have been set up to look after your society. All the anger that is generated gets misdirected and turned around by the propaganda machine and stupid people vote for more of the same because Jesus and fuck the Mexicans. I usually have some advice to offer at this point in my diatribe, but I can't brain out any solution for this gridlock. Sorry Americans, I am really sorry you guys need to deal with this level of bullshit on top of the regular life bullshit of bills/work/ingrown toenails/etc. The only thing I can say in consolation is that our cable/cellular providers are universally awful and overpriced. I hope that helps. permalink

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1ntdyf/til_bank_of_america_has_agreed_to_pay_410_million/

So we need to get back on discussion...Did banksters take your hard earned pay, play games with it, cost you something important ...perhaps a first date with a potential mate, groceries to feed your family, a pending home loan , or something worse ...cab fair for a job interview or to see sick or dying relative? The banks are preying on all of us but for the most vulnerable citizens who live paycheck to paycheck...they are creating a special misery for them. When will we stand together as a nation of citizens to say enough is enough!? Left right black white...we need to fight for what is right!

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[-] 3 points by elf3 (4203) 9 years ago

Andrian October 6, 2013 They stole WAAAY more than $410 million!!!!? The total was somewhere near $4 billion, so they were essentially charged a small (percentage wise) fee to steal from their customers. Even with their settlement payout, they made (and kept) a huge profit. The worst part is, the way the scam worked was by targeting their poorest customers. If you maintained a high balance in your checking or had a saving account you could overdraft from, the scam didn’t work on you. It was designed to only work on people that lived paycheck to paycheck. FUCK BOA! Boycott BOA! Spread the word!

We can't forget about people like the above poster

People have suffered silently and greatly at the hands of banksters...is this our culture now ...do we steal from the working poor?

[-] 1 points by elf3 (4203) 9 years ago

Most employers require direct deposit. Banking is not a choice...it is a requirement. And when you carefully track and budget your hard earned pay to take care of your life and loved ones...it is a crime a bank can falsify transactions so that the care you took matters not...if you have a low balance they will find a way to turn the gears against you...to hurt your life and your loved ones...they create misery and dysfunction...strife and strain...where there should be none. This my friends is an act of war. It is a war against our culture...against decency...against ethics...and against all that we hold dear in our hearts. It is time to stop rich yes rich people who run these banks from committing future acts. This is no longer business it is personal. Your names are on websites...we know who you are ...we will no longer let you hide behind your bank name or your gated community walls...this is our country and these victims of yours are our people. Your bank is so big you can't hide. CEO = direct accountability. WS banksters ...should't think of us as prey... they should fear us.

[-] 1 points by elf3 (4203) 9 years ago

They are creating a special misery and hardship for the poor...bullies twisting arms emptying accounts and saying ha ha sucker...what are you going to do...there are no police you can call...no help you can get...when your bank plays " Create Algorythmic Overdraft" and you live paycheck to paycheck all you can do is panic and cry. And tell your kids there should be food tomorrow...or hope the antibiotics or doctor can wait. Or that the other bank will believe you when you say you know you had enough and just deposited your pay in time... and can't figure out how you bounced your mortgage...

[-] 1 points by elf3 (4203) 9 years ago

And this one...

[–]kr1333 75 points 12 months ago* I worked for a top ten bank for nearly 30 years and retired as an executive in 2002. Around 2005 several of my kids, who were now in their 20s, were coming to me for help in managing their checking accounts. They couldn't figure out why they were getting these $35 debit card overdraft fees. Being a banker, I thought I could simply reconcile their credits and debits and help them avoid the problem, but that didn't work either. Something very screwy was going on with these accounts at BOA, Citi, and Chase, if you had a debit card. I sat in on one meeting at BOA with my son and all we heard was there was nothing the account executive could do about it, except waive the fees. Finally, in 2009, I came across a legal judgment against Wells Fargo, in which the presiding judge slammed the bank for what was basically racketeering. The bank had rigged its computer systems to process debits first in high to low sequence, and withhold credits to the end of the day or the next day. They gave clients with debit cards an overdraft line of credit without the client's knowledge or permission. They refused to reveal the overdraft limit, and they removed the Point of Sale computer check that prevented overdrafts. The customer would buy a $2 coffee, not know they were going into overdraft, and keep doing that all day, incurring a $35 fee for every purchase. This was a scam, pure and simple. Even as late as the go-go 90s, some executive would have said in a senior meeting "We can't do this to our customers - it is unethical." I know what happened, though. By 2000, all the big banks had a minimum 15% return on equity target for all businesses. At some banks it was 20%, and everyone was jealous of Goldman Sachs, which was making 30% returns, or $30 net income on every $100 of capital. That is not only an incredible return, it can only be achieved year after year by cheating the clients and gaming the system (usually by getting government subsidies). A sleepy little backwater business like check processing discovered a way to make billions of dollars profit every year with an overdraft scam, and suddenly they were big heroes in the bank getting bonuses like they were traders. Worse still, Alan Greenspan approved changes early in the decade to allow banks to offer OD facilities to customers and reorder credit and debit processing. Then the Fed and the Comptroller turned a blind eye to any abuses perpetrated by the banks, so with no regulatory oversight, the way was open for banks to maximize OD fees, especially against their poorer clients. I'm ashamed to say I was ever associated with the banking industry and what it has become. Don't even get me started on the fraud in home mortgages, how people had their homes stolen from them, and how banks, rather than clean up their problems, doubled down on their fraud by robo-signing phony notes and liens and submitting these to courts as if these were legitimate documents. When I joined banking, when a problem like this surfaced middle management was told to clean things up and do it right. Now it appears bank executives have no ethical standards at all. The $410 million fine is woefully inadequate for the fees BOA earned on this scam. Executives who authorized this should be put in jail for racketeering, and the board of the bank should be dismissed for failure to oversee the institution properly. The fact that none of this is happening is yet another failure among the banks, regulators, and the politicians. You cannot run a modern industrial economy with a banking system steeped in fraud. People need to have 100% confidence their money is safe with a big bank and they will be treated with absolute honesty in every respect. The big banks have lost their reputation for honesty, and that, frankly, is their product, not money (which is completely fungible). The long term consequences of this are very serious, especially when the consumer knows intuitively their money is not safe.