Why I hadn't moved to a community bank or credit union before now is beyond me. And I am thankful that someone has decided to seriously call them to account for their greedy practices, at least two of them. Now it appears that it may not be legal, or at least that's what I'm hoping a judge decides. I was fully aware that the second one was a deliberate practice of Wells Fargo to suck far more money out of me than they ever legitimately had claim to, but I assumed it was somehow legal in our wonderful world of bank deregulation and class war on the poor. I knew these things were going on, but I thought the first was some normal accounting irregularity of a complex electronic banking system, not realizing it was intended to gull me into overspending. These accounting tricks that came into play in the early 2000s must have been filling their coffers quite nicely, when repeated over and over thousands of times with thousands of their customers that live barely paycheck to paycheck, affording the execs hefty bonuses and other perks. At $30 a pop, this easily adds up fast, way beyond what ever fairly should have been your single overdraft fee. And guess what? With the $100 transaction counting first, it would be the $40 one that would put you over your limit (ca-ching, one overdraft charge of $30, thank you very much) and then the $20 transaction would be charged last causing yet another overdraft fee (double ca-ching, thanks sucker). I noticed that re-arranging several times. Oh, sure, they'd appear in your online account info in the order you charged them - at first - but then they'd re-order them at the end of the day or the next day, largest to smallest. Well, you'd think that would mean one overdraft charge for the last transaction that put you over your limit.

Say you had $130 in your account and charged something for $40 then $20 then maybe another $100, and you ended up $30 over your actual balance. If you missed that neat little trick about appearing and disappearing charges, you probably didn't miss this next little gem when you checked your accounts online. Sometimes a handful of transactions that amounted to no more than, say, $25 dollars could lead to well over a hundred dollars or more in overdraft fees. Well, that was a trick they used to gull you (and me) into spending over what they had as your real balance, and then they hit us with that fat $30 overdraft fee for every transaction no matter how small (even little $5-10 dollar ones). Do you have a Wells Fargo debit account in the Bay Area, or anywhere in the US for that matter?ĭid you ever check your balance online and find that a transaction was posted and then mysteriously disappeared? Of course, you didn't think you got whatever you bought for free, but perhaps thought the transaction was not final yet and you had a little more money at your disposal that day than you first thought.

Wells fargo pending transactions