“Why do I keep getting all these fees?”

This happened when I worked at a call center for a credit union.

I answered the call us usual.

Guy- “Hi, can you look at my account and tell me why I keep getting all these fees?”

I take a look and I’m confused as hell. He has a mobile deposit that bounced, a fee for the bounced check and an insufficient funds fee, repeated over and over again. Like this series of transactions went on consecutively for about 15 transactions. I told him I’d have to place him on hold to look into it.

I have the ability to pull up the image of the check to see what it was and hopefully that would give me some insight to what’s going on. Lo and behold, it’s a check written to him…from him. He literally used his own checks, wrote himself a check for x amount, and mobile deposited it. Our mobile deposit system worked on good faith. The funds (up to $200 at least) would be available immediately and as long as there weren’t any issues when the mobile deposit team checked everything, the funds would be released the next day. However, the $200 is available immediately until it gets looked at.

So this dude, who had $0 in his checking account, was writing himself a check, mobile depositing it and getting the money immediately until our deposit team caught it and reversed it. This triggered a bunch of automatic fees. The $0 balance account was essentially having checks attempting to clear it which gave a bounced check fee and an insufficient funds fee for money trying to pull out when there wasn’t any. (This credit union had a really lame rule that even if the account was only pending to go overdrawn, it would receive an insufficient funds charge. Super lame.)

Anyway. As he noticed the fees, HE KEPT DOING IT TO TRY AND COVER THE FEES. His account was now negative from the fees so he must have panicked and did it several more times. It was a shit show and a half.

I actually had to transfer him to our compliance (fraud) guys so they could explain that this is check fraud. I genuinely felt bad for him. He was so naive and truly unaware of what he was doing.

This was 5 plus years ago and I still think about it regularly and hope this dude is doing better in life