MyCardBlog

I recently wrote a post on “Get Overdraft Fees Back from Bank of America by Writing to Their CEO“. Many BOA customers did exactly the same way to get their overdraft fees back. But there are some banks that will not allow their customer service representatives to refund the fees to their customers. As a matter of fact, the fees charged by banks are huge every year! It’s a way to make profit for bank. ($33 billion dollars were payed by US consumers in insufficient funds and overdraft fees in 2003.) If you don’t check your online account frequently, sometimes you will accumulate more than $300 fees! If you don’t want to pay that fees, a collection agent might contact you. Your credit would be ruined in this way.

So the experience on how to fight with banks are essentially important. I made a mistake on one of my Chase Checking account several days ago. And I want to share my experience here with you.

I paid the Chase Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card with my Chase checking account without knowing that I didn’t have enough funds in that account (My direct deposit goes to National City Bank.). And in the next two days I didn’t check my online account thus I was not aware that I have a negative balance in my checking account. When I noticed it, there was a $32 “insufficient funds fee” charged in my account. The next day I went to Chase to deposit my money there immediately. However, Chase charged another $20 insufficient funds fee for that day. So for just two days I was charged a total of $57 insufficient funds fees by Chase.

Since this is the first time I made such a mistake, I called Chase customer service up and request to get a refund. The first time when I called in, an lady with Indian accent (speaking Indian English) told me that she could not refund me. She said I had already got a refund before! I told her that I knew she was lying. I then called Chase again after 10 mins. This time an American lady picked up the phone and told me that if I didn’t make a mistake in the past 12 months, I should receive the a refund. She told me that she put my request into the system and I would know the result in a few minutes. Yes, it did! A few minutes later, a refund of $57 went back to my account!

Then I knew that Chase allows its customers to make a mistake every 12 months! So if you are charged by Chase with an insufficient funds fee, you can call Chase and ask for a refund. If you failed at the first time, you can call Chase up again and do the same thing. Of course, the requirement is you should only make a mistake every 12 months.

Sometimes consumers might get confused with “insufficient funds fee” and “overdraft fee”. Actually both of them are indicating non-sufficient funds in your banking account. Different banks might have different ways to describe them. Sometimes you will also see Nn-sufficient funds fee (NSF) which means a transaction, check, or entry in excess of available account balance is returned unpaid. Overdraft, otherwise, means the entry is paid by bank.