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Comment by Freedumbs | Hacker News Reader

This is 100% true and also a tactic used by PNC when I was a near zero person. The hack around it was to try to withdraw cash, then use that. They wouldn't let you overdraft cash withdrawal. That's one anecdotal likely stale trick to avoid the traps they set.

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The problem is then you have the card number sitting in some online card wallet, set for Autopay or something, and suddenly it's just... allowed to charge you next month even though the card's got nothing.

Hell no, that shit should have bounced. Now you're in the hole $80 because your phone payment took an autopay from your Visa number.

Blindly allowing recurring auths to bypass the overdraft rules is utterly insane. Whoops, let's just autobill a few extra zeros!

When we had to juggle overdraft fees, our trick was to get a large money order. We would take one big overdraft with one fee and save ourselves from multiple fees while still paying multiple bills.

Interesting, PNC has never once done anything like this to me. In fact I feel that they are pretty up front about telling you what you have available and what your actual balance is.

It’s generally not something you’d notice if you’re not living on the edge of $0 balance. I’d be surprised if any banks are still doing it after the bofa settlement.

They were supposed to stop doing it 10 or so years ago. No clue if that's true. Haven't been the zero person for a while.

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