Charter One Bank ripoff undisclosed fees Buffalo New York

I feel the same as everyone who has to pay fees on "totally free checking", screwed. I am on of those people who is on a fixed income and gets 1 check a month. When I opened my checking account I was told that if I had direct deposit it would be free.

For the first six months I had no problems. I got a free no fee debit/credit card that I found out by getting my statement that my account was being charged for excessive use at the atm. I called the bank and was told that I was only allowed 8 transactions a month and I had gone over that amount. No knoweledge of that from personell when I opened the account, so I avoided that by withdrawing cash only once a month because even the checks I wrote were considered as part of my 8 transactions per month.

A few months later my statement showed service charge fees, and when I called about that iIwas told that the fees were attached to my using my debit/credit card as debit instead of credit card and am charged 1 dollar per debit transaction. I have recently moved from new york to phoenix and kept my charter one account because of my money being direct deposited (which the government says i must do because they are disability checks) and overdrew my account by 15 dollars and had 33 dollars in nsf fees.

It ended up costing me 198 in fees because I didn't have the finances to pay for the 48 dollars to bring my balance positive, so the fees kept piling up. I called the bank and they said there was nothing they could do.

I have been looking for a bank in phoenix to transfer my money to but they all seem to be the same. It's frightening to feel that the banking industry has gotten so big that they can abuse their customers with such crazy fees and there is nothing that the customer can do about it. I thought loan-sharking was illegal. What the banking industry is doing is making loan-sharks look like kindergarten play, and their doing it to us with our own money. Does the government know this is going on? Do they approve of this behavior? Is there any way to address this issue?

Rosemary
phoeix, Arizona
U.S.A.