Wainwright Bank Stole My Grocery Money

[redheadedmuse.livejournal.com]

After almost 10 years of doing business with Wainwright, I finally jumped ship this week after they charged me almost $100 in overdraft fees - even though my statement shows no overdraft at all.

As I said in my open letter to them, this is not just my issue. Banks are poised to rake in over $38 billion in overdraft fees this year, and Congress has just approved new regulations making the kind of sneaky accounting and overdraft "protection" racket Wainwright is using illegal. Those regulations haven't gone into effect yet, but I would have hoped our neighborhood "progressive" bank would be ahead of the curve in this important social justice issue.

I'm disappointed that a local bank that advertises itself as "banking on values" would treat its customers this way. It's a deceptive and predatory practice that traps financially marginalized people in a painful cycle of debt they can't get out of. Shame on you, Wainwright.

Comments

[cos]

Although many banks do reorder transactions to process the biggest debit first, Wainwright actually doesn't do that. Their policy is to process deposits before withdrawals/debits if they come in on the same day, and to process outbound checks in the order of their check numbers. What went wrong here is different from that, and is not caused by processing the largest debits first (which Wainwright doesn't do). I'm still not entirely sure why this worked the way it did, but part of it has to do with the fact that the deposited check's funds are not available until the following business day.

[turil.livejournal.com]

From what she described, she never deposited any money. She had three debts over the weekend without enough funds to pay all of them. The bank paid the biggest debt, and then charged her overdraft fees for the other two.

[cos]

If one stretches the interpretation greatly, it is possible to claim that what you wrote here is sort of correct, though stripped of all relevant meaning. Without stretching the interpretation, though, what you wrote here seems to display a lack of comprehension of what you read. I'm not sure which it is: That you actually don't understand what she described, or that you're trying very very hard to rephrase it in such a way as to make it seem like nothing went wrong.

[turil.livejournal.com]

Everyone else seems to agree that this is what happened. If you have some other set of facts, feel free to offer them.

The meanings aren't really relevant as it's a bank. They don't really do philosophy. They just add and subtract numbers.

[cos]

> Everyone else seems to agree that this is what happened.

Huh, and you said other people were "delusional". I really don't know what to make of this.

First of all, "she never deposited any money" is flatly false.

Secondly, they charged her three overdraft fees, and you say they charged two. (That's a minor error, but it shows you're not paying attention or being careful even with the basic facts.)

The rest of what you said can, as I wrote, be stretched to fit the facts, but it's highly deceptive and leaves out most of what people are actually talking about here. Just because you want to leave out everything that people are talking about here because you'd like for it to not be relevant, doesn't mean everyone else "agrees". If there are any delusions around here, that is definitely one of them.

I started going into detail but I'm deleting that, it seems not to be worth it.