Overdraft Justice

Test Ticker

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. The truth is, we're a long way from our $600,000 goal, and we have to get as close as we can by Tuesday so we don't have to make hard decisions come January. If you value our reporting, please consider pitching in today.

$600,000

We still need to raise 400,000: Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all matters.

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. We need to raise $600,000, or get as close as we can, by Tuesday so we don't need to make hard decisions come January. Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all makes a difference.

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

Here’s a tidbit of good news:

Wells Fargo & Co. should pay about $203 million to customers who say the bank manipulated debit-card transactions without their knowledge to increase revenue from overdraft fees, a federal judge ruled….Wells Fargo changed the way it treated customers’ daily debit transactions and cash withdrawals in December 2001, according to the lawsuit filed in 2007. Transactions with the highest dollar amount posted first, rather than in the order they occurred.

I’m pretty sure this is the result of a suit brought against Wachovia, which was purchased by Wells Fargo a couple of years ago. In any case, the practice of reordering debit card transactions has been fraudulent from the beginning, and I’m glad to see a judge doing the right thing here. (More about overdraft reordering here and here.) Hopefully the award won’t get knocked down by an appellate court.