This story seems to be scrubbed from the internet (or I can’t find it), but in the 2000s in the U.K. if you exceeded your overdraft limit you were charged £35 per transaction. This was usually caused by direct debits being taken before wages hit. One guy with three kids had gone back to college to study a postgrad and his wife had done the same, so for the year they were on a tight budget. He got hit with two of these £35 overdraft fees in one month so he contacted his bank to demand a refund. When the bank refused he informed them that he was a solicitor, that the bank could not legally charge such excessive fees for a service not even requested, and by law could only charge the customer the costs endured by the bank as a result of exceeding the limit. He said if they gave him back his £70 that would be the end of it, but if they didn’t he would pursue it and that would be bad news for his bank. The bank refused.
When he finished his postgrad he went on a tour of the country telling people how they could get these fees back. All it required was 6 years of bank statements with each fee highlighted accompanied by a solicitors letter (only costs about £50). It got picked up by media and the story went national. Last I heard British banks had had to book a £10 billion liability as a result of this. All because they wouldn’t give a student back his £70.
And it's still just a drop in the bucket. The fines are merely a cost of doing business and not an effective deterrent.
Yeah it didn’t cripple any of them, but the £10 billion wasn’t in fines, it was money they had to return to their customers. People got thousands out of it. I was living in England when this was going on and pretty much everyone was submitting their claims for refunds. It was nice to see ordinary people getting a few quid back from something like this for a change.
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