I understand returned payment fees for checks, but I’ve never been charged for having a credit card decline.
Stupid of me to sign up for auto-payment when I use my credit card for gas, I guess.
Cox is fucking scum.
Is the name intended as pure irony?
AFAF.
Time to cancel cox. 👍
“I have instructed my staff to handle your information request, you have been charged a ‘contact information handling’ fee of 50 dollars”
I’m decades old. The lesson I learned over decades is to NEVER sign up for autopay. NEVER. THERE’S NOT A COMPANY OUT THERE THAT BUGS YOU FOR AUTO PAY THAT WON’T ABUSE YOU.
Bill pay pushed from your bank account is okay – you can get even set up limits where it’ll cancel the payment if a bill is unexpectedly large.
Letting creditors pull from your bank account is what isn’t okay.
What if I’ve been paying for years without incident? There’s a thing where I can do autopay for mobile (Canada) where it’s $10 off the bill. I always hate the idea of autopay but they’ve never overcharged a bill…so far. By years I mean it’s been over a decade now.
Mostly curious if your stance still says no to this situation as well. I’ll guess yes, but still it’s $10 a month so adds up to almost a fast food meal these days lol.
For no perks I definitely agree, I pay my crap on time and takes like 5 mins a month to pay online.
returned
Yeah, I was thinking of editing my comment regarding this - lots of companies have started charging fees if you DONT use autopay. (They can call it a discount all they want, but the price you’re paying with autopay is the price. They’re really charging you a fee if you don’t.) Practically speaking, it is likely cheaper if you pay 1 overdraft fee a year than paying $10 a month for manual payment. But, I’m a crotchety old stubborn man who somehow has the idea he can change a giant corporation by giving them a fake middle finger.
Totally get this in concept, but I’d be paying more in late fees without autopay
Just spend the ten minutes once a month to pay from your bank using the payment service.
It is non-trivial to set a reliable reminder for some, and not due to laziness, just how brains are wired. Set a calendar reminder, you start ignoring it after a few months. Start an alarm, you start snoozing it early. Put a note on the fridge, it eventually becomes invisible. Not impossible to overcome, but also, as I started, non-trivial to solve.
“Just”
Thanks I’m cured
Yeah, this is a hard lesson everyone should take to heart.
I’m a Cox customer only because I have no better options.
This is by design. It’s called a mini-monopoly and our government should have put a stop to is 50 years ago.
I suppose with Cox we could be talking about TV or Internet. If it’s Internet I’ve heard it called a duopoly. The cable TV company and phone company both had wires running to every house when the internet showed up on the scene. Typically these are the only two options available in an area, and when you zoom in further usually one of them has given up on a particular street or neighborhood, and you better just go with the one that has decent wires.
We sort of had protections in place at the phone company level for a while to stop this. ILEC and CLEC laws forced Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (the big phone co in the area, owns the lines on the poles) to share their last mile phone lines with a Competitive LEC, granted the CLEC shells up for their own equipment and puts it in a special section of the ILECs central offices. Bam, competition.
The problem is that the laws only specified copper, so when fiber rolled around, ILECs specifically targeted their upgrades to cripple the competition. The houses still would do DSL on copper, but the backhaul for the CO would get upgraded to fiber and the competition would have to also upgrade their handoff on their equipment to be fiber or just lose all their customers in the area. They would also set up fiber fed cabinets halfway closer to your house and offer VDSL. CLECs weren’t allowed in those cabinets and could only offer 1/5th the speed on regular old ADSL due to distance. There were a lot of dirty tricks…the laws that were supposed to help just let the big company absolutely batter the smaller ones once they started their fiber upgrades.
My landlord charged me $250 for replacement of the original shower head through an “expert” (i used my own and didn’t fasten the hose enough at the end). 😢
Yeah that checks out. I’ve found out about this in a doubly infuriating scenario.
I was home abroad on a holiday, and they billed me for my regular monthly service. So naturally, i got slapped with the 25$ rejection fee, and then my bank decided to pay the overdraft on the second attempt, resulting in another 45$ in bank fees for that too.
Everything in the US is purposefully designed to fuck you over.
You have to opt in to overdraft protection and fees. Its not designed to fuck you over. You literally signed up for the service and can cancel it at any time.
That is not necessarily true. I opened a savings account recently and their terms were basically “We normally reject transactions that would cause an overdraft but we may choose not to at our sole discretion and if we do pay it you will owe us”
You could’ve chosen a different bank.
You could’ve chosen not to victim blame, but yet you did it anyway.
All banks in the US have similar authority, please see my lengthy post under the CFPB link elsewhere in the thread if you are actually here to discuss rather than sling cheap insults
Please look at the wording of 17(b)(1), emphasis mine:
Except as provided under paragraph © of this section, a financial institution holding a consumer’s account shall not assess a fee or charge on a consumer’s account for paying an ATM or one-time debit card transaction pursuant to the institution’s overdraft service, unless the institution:
The opt-in requirement is ONLY for ATM and one-time debit card transactions. For a preauthorized or recurring transaction like dinckelman was discussing, that does not apply.
Also some relevant sections of the official interpretation of 17(b):
- No affirmative consent. A financial institution may pay overdrafts for ATM and one-time debit card transactions even if a consumer has not affirmatively consented or opted in to the institution’s overdraft service. If the institution pays such an overdraft without the consumer’s affirmative consent, however, it may not impose a fee or charge for doing so. These provisions do not limit the institution’s ability to debit the consumer’s account for the amount overdrawn if the institution is permitted to do so under applicable law.
- Outstanding Negative Balance. If a fee or charge is based on the amount of the outstanding negative balance, an institution is prohibited from assessing any such fee if the negative balance is solely attributable to an ATM or one-time debit card transaction, unless the consumer has opted into the institution’s overdraft service for ATM or one-time debit card transactions. However, the rule does not prohibit an institution from assessing such a fee if the negative balance is attributable in whole or in part to a check, ACH, or other type of transaction not subject to the prohibition on assessing overdraft fees in § 1005.17(b)(1).
In summary:
- If it’s an ATM or one-time debit card transaction, you have to opt-in for them to charge you a fee
- If you didn’t opt-in, they are still allowed to cover the overdraft if they want to by taking from other accounts you have with them, they just can’t charge you an extra fee for doing so.
- If the overdraft is due to a preauthorized/recurring debit card transaction, a check, ACH, or other transaction not covered by 17(b)(1), your consent doesn’t matter, they get to charge you a fee.
Youre right. My bad
Its true and mandated by law in the US. Before this year, you could file with the CPFB and BBB fairly easily for this type of complaint and get a refund, but who knows if they have teeth anymore.
TWN did that to me too. My card expired and I called to give them the new number. They ran it without the new expiration date because the numbers were identical.
That text looks like a scam
Literally every cable company is a scam.
It’s been a bait-and-switch ever since it stopped being “Community Antenna TV” and they started showing ads on non-OTA channels.
As does the end of our conversation.
Fuck Cox.
Cox is really living up to their namesake of being a bunch of dicks.
You are also getting Max subscription plan with this, This will completely boost up your internet speed and you will be amazed by the higher speed and smooth service.
Oh, so smooth. Doubling that arbitrary throughout limit will obviously improve latency and jitter. I always have my network fully saturated all day, every day /s
Everything will be super fast and when you stream or browse there will be no buffering or interruptions and you will have a great experience
Yes, because buffering is caused by your inability to download 62 more megabytes of video a second. It’s totally not because the server isn’t sending video fast enough or anything. Fucking slimeball.
I’m not even getting the 500 I’m paying for already!
I would say it’s worth a complaint that you’re barely getting a tenth of the speed you’re paying for, but with cable/broadband, there’s a million and one potential causes for throughput being degraded and Cox customer support is useless.
Is the node saturated? Is there a coaxial splitter in your wall blocking high-frequency signals? Is the run from the node to your house too long or noisy? What about the run from your house to the DOCSIS modem? Is there interference somewhere? Are there coaxial ports unnecessarily connected and degrading the signal? Did they just bond the minimum number of channels to reach the theoretical maximum of 500 Mbps under perfect conditions?
Who knows! Cox doesn’t know, and Cox doesn’t care. But hey, maybe you can be tricked into spending another $20 for even more unfulfilled promises!
Same for Verizon. Or if your bank account doesn’t have enough funds. Or even if it does, and your bank says the transaction never happened, as long as Verizon says it happened, they charge you a fee.
That’s fucking wild. I have two cards that are occasionally declined because they want to make sure I’m making the transaction. I can afford it but I’d be pissed paying a fee because my credit card company suspected I might not be the one wanting to upgrade to a second phone or whatever.
They blacklisted my bank account and wouldn’t allow me to add another. So I paid off my devices and switched to Mint mobile. I’m saving $150 a month. And my coverage is better.
It’s expensive being poor. I used to get charged £15 if I didn’t have the funds because I wasn’t allowed an overdraft. Being unable to pay £5 left me with £-8 frequently. Because apparently I was allowed an overdraft if they did it to me.
When I was doing Amazon Turk - had like $10 to my name, I accidentally clicked on “withdraw funds” instead of “deposit funds” for the $15 I’d spent ten hours earning.
Bank of America charged me $35 for the “overdraft.”
Here’s my “Fuck BofA” story. A long time ago now, I was really tight on cash on a Friday and needed a few things before my next paycheck on Wednesday. I knew how much money I had in my account, and knew what I could afford, and what I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t afford the gas for my car if I bought my groceries and paid a few other bills, which meant that I would just overdraft the card for the gas. I’d be about $10 short of filling up the tank, so I was okay with paying the $35 overdraft fee for the gas, because I needed it to get to work. I did the math, and I’d be roughly -$50 when it was all said and done.
Come Monday, I find that I’m at -$500. I look at my account history, and I see that BofA reorganized all my transactions from the weekend, processing them from largest to smallest. So instead of ONE large purchase overdrafting my account and accruing a single overdraft fee, they hit me with like 6 overdraft fees because of all of the smaller, ~$5 purchases I had made that weekend.
I fought with them for months, telling them that I’d pay the single overdraft fee if they agree to charge me based on the timeline in which I actually made the purchases, but they refused to budge, and eventually closed down the account, and also blacklisted me from opening an account with any major bank again.
The next year, a law was passed that made it so they can’t do that anymore. But the law didn’t make them pay back anybody that they already fucked over.
A lot of banks like to do that biggest to smallest it seems. The one I asked about it gave an excuse of 'the bigger payments are probably things like rent or car payments and we wouldn’t want THOSE to bounce since there was some hard cutoff to the amount they let you overdraw. Nonsense of course, but that was the line given.
It’s your responsibility to manage your finances, not theirs. It’s bullshit that they’d even consider any method of processing payments other than first come, first served.
Yeah, but consider it as a holdover from when people used to pay with these things called checks (cheques) that would only have a date not an exact time stamp and instant electronic processing. The bank would receive a stack of them you paid on Saturday, but they wouldn’t know when exactly.
It was still nonsense that would cause as many overdraft fees as possible to punish the poor, but they didn’t have a way to say who was truly first.
I knew exactly what your story was going to be about by the end of the first sentence. It’s so common that it’s immediately predictable. Fuck BofA and their bullshit.
We too were victims of the BoA shuffle which maximized what fee they’d hit us with. Was one of many reasons why we said goodbye and joined a credit union.
I hope you are with a local or regional credit union now.
Yep! I actually closed my account pretty much immediately afterwards, and went with a local credit union which has been consistently great! They gave me a really good rate when I needed a car loan, have floated me if I was a little short before my direct deposit came in…
Glad to hear it. This is one of the best “small things” you can help people with, in my opinion. BofA is so predatory. I switched to a credit union here in Seattle from them years ago. It was literally the first time I actually earned money in savings rather than it be melted away by fees.
I switched from chase to becu a while back and the difference is staggering. I should have done it way earlier
I use BECU as well. I am in Seattle. Chase is the devil. I never forgive them for causing Easy Street to close in LQA.
Disabling overdraft is the first thing people should do when opening a bank account. It’s extremely predatory.
Wells Fargo made a lot of money on ‘Sort Order Optimization’
Say you have $100 in your bank account. You buy a candy bar for $2 from a vending machine, a coke for another $2, fill up $20 worth of gas, and then spend $100 on groceries. You’d think one overdraft charge, for the groceries, right?
Nope. The groceries will be taken out first, then the gas, then the candy bar and coke. Three overdraft charges.
It’s expensive being poor - and they knew that:
“Given our dependence on a small set of OD consumers (4% generate 40% of total OD/NSF revenue),” Zimmerman wrote, “a small change in behavior within this group can cause a large change in revenue.”
That is so fucked up
And is now illegal, thankfully.
