I just received my Bank of America statement for my checking/savings account, only to find a NEW monthly fee:
“Check Image Service Fee”
Really?!? $3.00 per month just to have the images of the checks included with my monthly statement?? Where the hell did this come from??? Here is another article on the new fee.
It’s bad enough that some 5 or so years ago, the banks stopped providing the return of the physical checks in the statements, only providing a crude scanned image of each check! Now they don’t even want to give us that?!?
What’s even worse are the BULLS**T lines they feed their employees to feed to us when we complain! (I know it’s not the local employees’ fault – they’re just trying to do what they’re told) They tried to tell me that I can always go online and print the images from the web site – HELL, I can print the entire statement from there, but I don’t want to! Considering the ridiculous interest rates they offer, the LEAST they can do is mail me a statement once a month! Then they said “it’s an extra page…”, so I pointed out that they waste an entire page every month with the “How To Balance Your Bank of America Account” page. They claimed a lot of their customers still use that to balance their checkbook. Well, A LOT OF THEIR CUSTOMER STILL WANT THE CHECK IMAGES, TOO!!
And if they’re going to make a change like this, the DEFAULT SHOULD NOT BE to charge everyone an extra $3.00 per month and force them to OPT-OUT – the DEFAULT should be to drop the images from the statement and tell people they need to OPT-IN if they are willing to PAY AN EXTRA FEE!!!
I’ll bet that pretty soon, they’re going to force everyone to go to “paperless” or pay a monthly statement fee! Then they’ll start charging us to use the ATM – ANY ATM! Then we’ll even have to pay for each transaction, regardless of where/how we did it (online, ATM, in person, …).
What is this country coming to that the huge companies have to continue to take advantage of and abuse their customers?? They are here for us, not the other way around!! And then they whine when their profits are down! I guess they need to screw us to be able to pay their top executives??