4

They Can (and Will) Seize Your Money

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If you, say, don't pay your bar tab, your local barkeep has to take several infuriating steps to try to get his money: He has to locate you, chase you down, smash your knees, and empty your wallet. Slightly more respectable bill collectors have just as many obstacles between themselves and unpaid invoices, the most severe step being to sue to have money taken directly out of your wages. But even then they can only do it in certain amounts, and by law there is some money they can't touch. For instance, they can't garnish funds out of Social Security checks. That shit is strictly earmarked government money, not to mention that taking it would be monstrous because those checks go to some of the poorest, oldest, and most disabled people in society.

Banks, however, can do whatever the hell they like, because they already have full access to our money.

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"Eh, you got cats. You can eat those."

You're keeping it in their building; they can just reach right in. They could be in the vault right now, rubbing their dicks on it. So while nobody can garnish money from a Social Security check, once it's deposited into a bank, it joins the pool of money that the bank considers free for the taking. So if you happen to owe the bank money (like those overdraft fees mentioned above), they just poke in a straw and slurp that money right out.

Think we're exaggerating in order to make banks out to be mustache-twirling villains? OK -- take the story of this Cleveland woman, who fell for a check fraud scam that left her account deep in the red. Her bank promptly notified her that they were going to take her Social Security check to cover the overdraft. "But why doesn't she close the account and go to a different bank, Cracked?" Hey, good idea! She did that, then quickly found out that banks talk to each other. She was immediately blacklisted and unable to open a checking account elsewhere.

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So she went to a store that cashes checks, and then she got mugged.

3

They Sell Old People Services They Can't Use in the Hope That They Will Die

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A man visited his local Bank of America branch to do some routine financial muddlin' about. He was referred to a financial consultant and eventually force-sold an annuity that would only be beneficial if it could be maintained for a bare minimum of seven or eight years. Otherwise, it would only be beneficial to the bank.

So what's the problem? That man was 86 years old, and presumably not a Highlander.

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"I don't even use the free toaster they gave me. Who has that kind of time left?"

When his daughter learned what the bank had done, she tried to find a way out of it for him. Sadly, the only way to undo it was to pay a whopping $25,000 to the bank. Hey, just consider it extra incentive to stay alive, old timer!

There's a reason the elderly are the most frequent targets of scammers -- they have money and can be easily confused with enough doubletalk. They often have a hard time admitting that they do not understand something, or maybe they just quit giving a shit 20 years ago.

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"Bitcoin? No, thanks. I'd like the whole thing."

2

They Can Repossess Your Home Despite Telling You Otherwise

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Even the most trustworthy person can fall on hard times and miss some mortgage payments. Luckily, the banks know that it would be foolish to kill off a decent cash cow for a momentary setback. That's why, in cases like this, they sometimes offer you a short-term mortgage modification option that helps you get through the rough patch, instead of straight up taking your house.

Or, they can tell you they're working with you on the mortgage, then randomly sell your house out from under you while you're doing the paperwork.

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"The paper's made of wood from your dining table."

That's what happened to a Minnesota woman who initiated steps for mortgage modification in 2012. The bank was totally cool with it: She only needed to wait until she was behind on payments, then fill out some paperwork and wait for them to accept her request. All along the process, the bank gave her friendly smiles and enthusiastic thumbs-ups, even taking the time to tell her not to worry about all those foreclosure notifications she kept receiving in the mail -- they were totally just automated routine notices. And then, out of the blue, she found out that her house had been sold at a sheriff's auction. The bank had given her no notice whatsoever that the house was repossessed and sold to a stranger -- she found out when she called the bank to check up on the mortgage modification request. Two guesses as to whether it was ever approved.

1

Their Staff Is Obligated to Actively Screw You

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There are precious few chances to deal with a human being when banking these days, and pretty much every single one of them involves a teller. The bare minimum of civilized interaction banks offer in the middle of all the bureaucracy is welcome: Sure, the tellers are working for the bank, but at least you know they're regular Joes and Janes like you -- schmucks earning a paycheck. They're just delivering the orders of the giant money machinery; it's not as if they're personally screwing you over.

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If you prick them, do they not bleed? (Do not try this.)

Or so you'd think.

Bank tellers are constantly, actively attempting to talk customers into meeting with various consultants and signing up for services that A) they probably won't ever need and B) can in fact be harmful for the customer's financial situation. The practice is known as cross-selling, and tellers are often motivated with cash prizes and other incentives to do as much of it as they humanly can. For example, in 2010, the government made it illegal to automatically sign customers up for those pesky "per transaction" overdraft charges we mentioned earlier. Unless, that is, someone specifically opts in. Cue your teller, who, aided with some handy marketing tricks, can and absolutely will convince people to opt in, using such convoluted language that more than half of the customers who choose these newly branded overdraft "protection" fees actually have no goddamned idea what they signed up for.

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"Debit card protection fee" = "Cash gift from you to bank"

To be fair, though, it's not as if the tellers have too many options themselves. One teller says her bank not only set strict cross-selling quota requirements, but sent over 50 emails a day demanding that they be met. And if they're not, that's too bad for the employee -- the bank tellers' base pay is so laughably insufficient that a third of them are on welfare. Yes, on top of everything else, your tax dollars are helping pay the bank's labor costs, which it uses to hire employees whose job it is to screw you. Gosh, we really do wonder why banks have such an awful reputation.

Please feel free to email Spencer with any related comments as you see fit!

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Related Reading: While we're on the subject of evil banks, did you know BCCI has their own SWAT team. It's enough to make us not feel bad at all about insane heist stories. And by the way: screw debt collectors.