BoA Strikes Again: Check Image Service Fee
I keep hearing about how banks have started, well, raping their customers with sneaky fees and I like to think that I’m diligent enough when it comes to my finances to dodge them but, once again, Bank of America has dinged me with an unannounced fee that I’ve never once had to pay in the past.
This is the second time in just 3 months that I’ve been assessed a “new” fee.
Last time it was a $14 charge, billed a Monthly Maintenance Fee, for letting my balance go under $1500 when the previous floor was $750. I must’ve missed some fine print on the back of some flyer stuffed in my with my statement or something…
They hit me twice with that fee. Twenty-eight bucks for nothing…
This time the fee was only $3. Some might call that nickel-and-diming and not that big of a deal but in reality, that’s 60 nickels or 30 dimes. That’s some serious change.
This time they call it a Check Image Service Fee.
So, remember when you used to get the actual checks that you wrote back with your statement each month? That stopped years ago and then they started printing postage stamp sized pictures of the checks written on your statement. Now they’re charging for that, apparently.
Okay, whatever, that’s fine.
I can imagine that there were some substantial costs involved in actually stuffing the original checks into envelopes. Those days are long gone and I’m sure the banks have seen tons of savings as a result.
Scanning the checks (which they have to do anyway) and printing them on the customer’s statement costs, well, essentially nothing. Maybe one extra page per statement and a tiny bit of toner. For a bank, that’s the cost of doing business.
Kinda like the free lollipops if you actually set foot inside a branch — if they even still offer those…
The thing is, who writes checks anymore?
They’re trying to capitalize on a service that’s rapidly going extinct anyway…
In short, I know that they’re really just trying to push their customers to go paperless in some kind of “green” initiative which, I’m sorry, is just stupid.
Newsflash: Paper does grow on trees.
But what *really* rubs me the wrong way about this fee is that I didn’t write ONE SINGLE CHECK during my past billing statement so there are no check images…
What’d I get for that thee bucks?
Nothing.
Why am I still with this bank?
