Mountebanking fees

Washington Mutual has been working this con at least since it took over First National Bank.

The NYT reporter has contributed to the sham by referring to these scam charges as "overdrafts." By doing so the reporter has allowed the banks to control the context of the debate. Many people were using ATM machines as "assistant bookkeepers," as it were. Believing the machine would stop coughing up money when the bank account dropped below $20, they relied on the machine to warn them it was time to ove cash from savings to the household ATM account, or deposit some money into the account.

Without announcing the new "benefit" it imposed after taking over FNB, WM not only sprang the charge on the customer, then doubled the "benefit" by putting the newly defined "bounced check" through TWICE -- "as a courtesty" -- before sending a notice of the charges to the customer.

WM and other banks obviously manufactured this "window of opportune error" and then exploited.

WM compounded the likelihood of profitable error by 1) falsely assuring that during the ownership transition period FNB customers would not face additonal charges for using their FNB ATM card in a WM ATM machine; and then 2) intenitonally jamming FNB ATM cardholders with a $1.50 "alien bank" transaction fee while they waited to get the replacement WM card in the mail. This salt-in-the-wound fee was, of course, heaped on top of the scam "overdraft" charge.

Such mountebanking has been going on for at least two years. It's but another example of how corporations have been mining the "fines, fees and penalities" vein for windfall profits. All of it made strictly legal by Congress, and all of it a dire reflection of the relentless "financialization" of what was, once pon a time, a production economy, you see.