33 cents: or, how Bank of America edged out AT&T as the most loathsome company I have ever dealt with.

This is a long story. One you may or may not want to read but that I need to get off my chest.

I've had a BofA checking account since my first week living in Los Angeles twelve years ago. I opened the savings account more recently, but the fact is I've been a customer of theirs for a long time. I also had a credit card with them for overdraft protection (kind of a ripoff) that I opened when overdrawing my account was a real concern. It bailed me out of bounced checks a couple of times and BofA got a fee in return. Three accounts total.

Fast forward to today. I opened a checking account at a credit union a few years ago for a car loan (they offered a MUCH better rate) and when I got married my wife and I had our joint checking at  the credit union, so I never really used the BofA account. I paid $12.00 a month to park a few hundred bucks there to keep it open, and I had a weekly online transfer set up to move some money from our credit union checking to my BofA savings. See, this is all just the setup.

I've been thinking of closing my accounts for a while, as I said, I did my banking from the credit union and I was just paying them to keep a little bit of money safe. It didn't make sense but I was kind of lazy. I wish I could claim some kind of political ideology finally motivated me to pull the trigger (I love the Move Your Money thing) but in the end I was just trying to simplify and on January 20th I closed my accounts.

Two days later I got the familiar email from BofA, stating that they were planning to make a transfer, per my request, and to make sure I had the money in the bank. This was not out of the ordinary except that I had closed my accounts a few days earlier. A glitch I thought, surely they won't do it. Three days later, the money was gone from checking, transferred to my phantom accounts at BofA. Naturally I called customer service (I won't get into the endless phone trees, the transfers, the security questions asked and answered ad nauseum, it's too exhausting) to see what was going on. I was assured it was a glitch in the system, a transfer initiated before the account had been fully closed on their servers (or some such) and that once the system realized there was no account the money would be bounced back and I'd never be bothered again. And that's what happened, until I got the second email. We're taking your money, get ready it said.

Surely this has been solved I thought. Until the money came out a second time. I won't get into the customer service nightmare because I'm sure it's all too familiar. The phone trees, finally getting through to be told I don't have an account, trying to explain the problem, the transfers, the security questions. I spoke with a dozen different people over the course of several hours over a few days, none of whom could answer my questions or give me a solution. One woman kept telling me my account was open when the transfer was initiated. When pressed for the date she kept telling me November 17th. Why she was back in November is still beyond me, but for some reason she couldn't move forward in time, it was unbelievable. Finally I got someone on the phone that said they found my money, that "the system"had issued me a check for the full amount minus a .33 cent service charge. SERVICE CHARGE?  WTF? For the inconvenience of stealing my money? She explained it was a charge due from the month before I closed the account, but she couldn't explain why they didn't take it out at the time they wrote my check when I closed the account or whether they planned to bill me for it previous to their unauthorized money transfer shenanigans. She still hadn't solved my initial problem though, so I hung up, stomped around and called another number. Finally (after the same security question, explanation, computer crash transfer rigmarol they always put you through) I found someone who could re-activate my account online so I could cancel the transfer plan myself. Problem solved (I guess).

Which brings us back to the "service charge". 33 cents. I've lost more than that from my pockets at the dentist. You see that on the ground and keep walking because it's not worth the effort to pick up, much less go to war with one of the largest banks in the nation over. But they know that. It's like the heist movie where the protagonist (or antagonist depending on the pov) comes up with a brilliant computer program that skims a fraction of a cent of some huge transaction, making them millions. How many tiny "fees" do they assess every day to their millions of customers? To us, it's not worth dealing with, but to them it could mean millions. Writing about it now seems to come dangerously close to conspiracy theory territory, but it just seems so dishonest to me, so arrogant, to just take this tiny bit of money from me. When they already have so much. When they've already taken so much. Knowing that it's not worth the effort to bother with it. Am I alone here?

So that's where it stands. I've been violated by a bank. It's gotten to the point where they can just reach into our pockets and take what they want, as long as it's not enough for us to complain individually. But as a whole, they must be making a fortune.