Good morning, you owe us $887,180 dollars and 48 cents | Hacker News Reader

Good morning, you owe us $887,180 dollars and 48 cents

praetorianprefect.com

51 pointsPrefect17 comments

Use credit unions for your everyday checking and savings. I got tired of being treated like a rounding error at my local corporate bank and opened a checking account with a credit union. Some benefits:

- $1000 overdraft loan

- No $30 charges for overdrawing $0.25

- Interest earning checking account

- Automatic foreign ATM fee reimbursement up to $30/month

- personal service

- ability to vote out directors

Not saying that an error like the one in this article won't happen at your credit union, but I doubt they would let you leave the building without resolving the issue.

I can't say enough about what the credit union has done for my financial health.

I concur with this one. And this isn't the worst of what these large banks do. How about where they have a computer program which re-orders transactions (out of their normal chronological order) in such as way as to maximize overdraft fees.

For example, let's say that you have $100 in your account and pay transactions of $20, $50, and $110 (in that order) with your debit card.

Instead of letting the first 2 go through and then hitting you with a $30 overdraft fee on the last one, or maybe even rejecting the charge, they instead put the $110 charge first. Charge you a $30 overdraft fee and then since your account is overdrawn, hit you with 2 more $30 fees for the $10 an $20 transactions.

The backlash against this sort of behavior has made the banks back off, but do you really want to do business with an institution that treats the customer this way?

I went through a somewhat similar nightmare with Citibank years ago, which prompted me to switch to a credit union. I've never regretted that decision, they've been great:

- There's real, trained staff both at the branches and manning the phones. They have the authority and motivation to sort out problems for you.

- I can use almost any other union's ATM with no fee, they're in a cooperative network, I don't even have to get a refund.

- I know my deposits are funding straightforward loans, not financial shenanigans or empire building by bank CEOs.

This practice looks set to be outlawed soon, to the the banks' chagrin: http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?st... I had an entertaining episode earlier this year where I went into a bank to dispute about $100 of charges that had been levied this way; after some effort, I persuaded a bank official to handle the call on speakerphone - literally, by refusing to take the handset she kept trying to hand me and insisting it be on speakerphone - and letting the phone staff explain at length about their large-to-small temporal reordering, before pointing out that I had made a cash deposit both larger and earlier than the withdrawals. And the phone people still didn't want to back down until I produced a digital recorder and pointed out that I'd recorded the entire conversation.

Following this debacle I had an illuminating conversation with the manager at the local branch. Part of the issue (with many large banks) is that they've internally reorganized so that the branch network is a separate company from the bank, and the outrageous overdraft fees, $3 ATM fees etc. are what finances the branch network.

This allows the bank to claim to customers and regulators that they don't make any profit off these fees (because technically the fees are collected on behalf of 'Megabank Branch Operations LLC') while at the same time claiming to their investors and bondholders that they've cut their expenses to the bone (because the branch operations no longer show up as an expense on their balance sheet, whereas the profits from things like mortgages do).

So when you try to get a fee reversed, neither the phone nor the local branch people want to do it because the reversal will be charged to them and reflect on their performance record. Local branches now have about as much influence on The Bank as an individual fast-food restaurant has on the franchise company, ie none at all. Plus, anyone who went to work for a bank at a local branch with the aim of eventually becoming a banker has been suckered, since local banking is now devoted to basic customer service and sales of financial products but they have little or no discretion the handling of customers' accounts. Working your way up the corporate ladder is now out; if you want to be in banking rather than customer service, you need to get an MBA and re-apply to corporate, hoping your time in local branch banking will give you an edge over other candidates - but word is that customer-facing experience is actually regarded as a disadvantage.

tl;dr the modern model of retail banking is to own the deposit/payment system, not get your hands dirty with it.

Everyone's said great things about credit unions. So where's the downside? Do you get less interest? There must be some reason they haven't overcome the corporates.

Well, one downside is that they don't have ATMs all over the place. Some are in a [group](http://www.co-opfs.org/public/locators/atmlocator/index.cfm) that offer free withdrawals for any member of a credit union in the group, but they're harder to find than, say, a Chase ATM.

Interesting. I think most banks and building societies in the UK are on Cirrus, so get free withdrawls almost everywhere. I guess building societies are our equivalent of credit unions, but I'm not sure.

Using 'special' numbers seems like a really bad idea. Wonder if someone did transfer $888,888.88 out, and then contacted fraud, could they convince them that it was an error and get the money refunded to their account, whilst keeping the money that was transferred? Probably a long shot, might make a fun movie script though :/

No. Seriously, why do you think that would even be possible?

All transfers have tracking information and source/destination information. Not only would your withdraw request be denied (insufficient funds), but also they would identify that it wasn't an internal transfer.

1) Open an account with, say, $1M as the opening balance.

2) Withdraw $888,888.88

3) Armed with a bank statement showing this transaction, and everything that's online about this magic number, threaten to go to the media with your story unless the bank "refunds" your missing money. The bank doesn't want to lose all its customers so it gives in, even though it knows you're ripping it off. Kevin Spacey plays the bad guy.

Good enough (maybe, just) for a movie script at least. In reality I'm sure step 4 is "Go to prison".

Why so complicated? Just buy a failing bank and ask the treasury to give you the money. Futz about for a year or two then complain that your hands were tied by regulators and you weren't able to make a profit. Resign in tears, collect a fat severance check, and go to work for the SEC.

I was kind of wondering about something similar, while not exactly that. What if someone does do a transaction (a legitimate one) for 888888.88, does it mess up the bank's handling or total for deposits because its being handled differently?

What if that amount was fraudulently taken from a large balance account, would the bank notice or assume its part of a fraud investigation?

Please correct the title. (Or is `use' there on purpose?)

it's probably 'us'

or perhaps U.S.

> or perhaps U.S.

If that was the case, the owing would be the other way around and the amount would be orders of magnitude larger.

Good morning, good luck collecting.

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