Bank of America NSF Fees

Bank of America has continuously charged my accounts NSF fees for a variety of convoluted reasons. It would be one thing if my account was straight up overdrawn and they charged me a fee, but this is not their practice. BOA posts transactions in random orders and in addition puts holds on deposits to your accounts. If a deposit is put on hold you are not told why but you are mailed an explanation which you recieve usually the same day the hold is taken off or afterwards. Meanwhile any transactions which you have had against your account will be reversed and a $35 NSF fee will be charged for each transaction no matter what the amount of the transaction. So if you bought a soda for 1.50 and used your debit card but did not know your deposits were in a hold status that soda would end up costing you $36.50. This is an absolute attrocity. In other circumstances BOA will post transactions to your account in the order at which it is overdrawn the quickest and then subsequently charge you NSF fees for each transaction after your account is placed in the red. Not to mention the NSF fees alone will put your account in the red and then you are charged fees on top of this. An example is if you have a balance of $500 and 4 checks totaling $530 are posted to your account in the amounts of $490, $25, $10, $5. If these checks were posted in the reverse order I listed you would be overdrawn only on the largest check. However BOA posts the largest transaction first and then overdraws your account on each smaller transaction afterwards. As such you have 3 NSF fees charged to you for $105 and have all of your transactions returned versus having 1 NSF fee for $35 and possibly 1 transaction being reversed. This is a regular ongoing practice and when asked to explain why this is done this way the response is transactions are processed as they come in, which is simply not true. Their own online system will show you the pending transactions against your account which may show your accounts are fine or you may be close to your limit, but then a look the next day will show transactions which were not shown as pending the day before being posted or not depending on the $ amount your account overdrawn and a host of NSF fees charged to your account.

On top of all of this chaos which the bank performs to your accounts, you are not able to speak to a single representative who can help you. There are no local phone #'s to call to speak to your branch manager, ony 800 #'s and a wait time at least 20 minutes. Even if you do go through the process of waiting the person you speak to cannot assist you and if you demand to speak to a supervisor they will escalate your call put you on hold for another 15 minute and the scenario continues. If you have a couple of hours to spend on the phone you may eventually get to speak to a person who can reverse these fees but not willingly. In general prior to speaking to this person you will be hung up on.

Regulators need to step into this scenario and put a stop to this practice. This is the only bank I have seen do this and for the average person who is struggling to make ends meet, having your bank steal money from your accounts at will is abhorrent.

Comment On This

I am going through the same thing right now with BOA. I have had it, there explanation is when the hold was placed on my account to pay for a item other transactions came in and were deducted from my balance but then the rep tells me at the end of the day the money that was on hold was placed back in my account and the next day actually paid. Meanwhile the transactions that did come in were labeled NSF. These were dollar items. I have been on the phone with BOA for the past three days. I have escalated it to customer solutions and they said there is nothing they can do. But remember on the actual ledger screen never once did I go overdrawn. I have had it.....