[Sussex] Bank charges, important court case

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Andy Smith wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 08:43:14AM +0100, Andrew Guard wrote:
>   
>> The barrister Tom Brennan believes bank penalty charges are illegal
>> and he try to get "exemplary damages". plus full refund. And the bank
>> has no choice but to defend this action.
>>     
>
> This sort of thing makes me quite uncomfortable.  I was a student
> once.  I was terrible with money.  I always went over my overdraft
> limit and got charged stupid amounts for it.  I wasn't much better
> in the first few years of work after uni either.  Is that the bank's
> fault?  I believe it was my fault and no one is to blame but me; I
> would not dream of trying to claim any of it back.
>   
Is it me, or does this seem amazingly off-topic for this list?

That said, he's not suing because there are overdraft charges. He's 
suing because he thinks they're ridiculously, even larcenously high, and 
the banks have apparently always caved in rather than actually go to 
court to see if they're being outrageous. And he does seem to have a 
point in his case, where there was an unauthorized withdrawal against 
his account which triggered a series of overdraft charges.

Making people jump through hoops to get their money back after excessive 
overdraft charges, but eventually letting them get their money back if 
they actually take it to court, is not the same as not overcharging them 
in the first place. And it *is* a problem: I just had a problem where an 
employer told me "you're getting paid Monday", and I wrote someone a 
check for Tuesday based on that, but the money didn't come through until 
Thursday because it was routed through another company.

"You're getting paid Monday" is not the same as "we're sending someone 
else a check Monday and they'll pay you when they get around to it": I 
didn't know about the other company being involved: I took them at their 
word. So I damn near had a big check bounc
> I know there are lots of people really struggling and them being hit
> with bank charges that mean they can never clear their debts is just
> wrong, but it's hard to believe that this guy is or was one of them.
>
> The article says he ran up £2,500 of charges on an unauthorised
> overdraft.  I'm sure that did not happen overnight, so why did he
> not speak to the bank and tell them he had no way of clearing it?
> At which point I would hope they would close his account and he
> could have gone through a process to repay over time, and operate a
> reduced facilities account (i.e. no overdraft facility) in the
> meantime.  If you ignore things then yes the charges mount up.
>   
What makes you think he didn't? Have you every *tried* to get such a 
charge dropped?

Seriously, he may have also got caught up in the principle of the thing.

> Of course we don't know the full story and maybe he did speak to
> them, I don't know.  I just worry that somewhere along the line
> personal responsibility is going out of the window.  If he wins this
> case then banks will not dare to apply charges in case someone else
> says they are unfair.  What then will they do?  Make it very hard to
> get overdrafts?  Close accounts as soon as they start attracting
> charges?
>
> What other agreements will later be considered unfair?
>   
Whoah. I don't know why you think this. It's not the existence of 
overdraft charges he's upset about, it's the *amount*. The overdraft 
charges right now are pretty serious: they're one of the major profit 
sources for so-called "free checking".