Join Us For Our ‘Bank Anger’ Tour
Geoff Williams, WalletPop: Bank fees are on the rise, and sometimes it may seem like there’s not much we can do but complain. But complaining is something.
Now, I know that it’s nothing new to blast a bank on a blog, or trash it on Twitter or spread your fury about their practices on Facebook, but with bank fees climbing and climbing (overdraft fees are estimated to cost Americans $38.5 billion this year), I went on my own little Internet tour today, looking around for reactions to banking fees, just to see what I could find and get a sense of how people are feeling toward banks these days. Not too surprisingly, I found a lot of ugly out there.
People are mad. As Hell.
First up, a blog posting at BigRobby.com. Seems this blogger and father from Maine rented five movies from a place called Redbox, and the folks at Redbox didn’t put the charges through once, but as five individual charges through Big Robby’s credit or debit card. He had a lower balance than he thought, and wound up getting five $35 overdraft fees from Bank of America. Big Robby is not pleased. Robby wrote a post about his feelings about Bank of America. He also expressed his feelings in a lovely photo of a finger (I’ll let you guess which finger) next to the words, Bank of America.
Going over to Twitter, I typed in the words “bank fee” in the search engine, I pulled up a number of colorful expressions, mostly associated with (again) Bank of America. One young woman with the handle @Lessafish complains of an extended overdraft fee (the daily fee a bank lodges on you when your account has been in the negative for more than a few days). She uses a colorful two-word expression that suggests the bank digest some fecal matter.
Another Twitter user, @s7p, says she has closed her Bank of America account, ending her 140 character tweet with: “Take that, fee-mongerers!”
