New cute bank trick

About two years ago, I took most of my money out of banks, putting it into a local credit union. I’m extremely happy with my credit union, which explains its procedures simply and doesn’t hit you with dozens of tricks and traps.

Well, maybe I should move my last account from Commerce Bank, a regional bank in the Midwest. Here’s the latest trick/trap offered by Commerce. It offers online banking, but Commerce has decided that it will only let you SEE the past 6 months of your transactions online, unless you pay Commerce an extra fee of $6 or $10. Here’s the notice that popped up on the Commerce website.

Commerce Bank ripoff

You might be thinking what I’m thinking: They already HAVE all of the customer account data . It’s not like it costs them anything more to display it ALL. But they would rather that you pay them something for nothing.

After viewing the above page on my browser I took the above screen shot. I then tried to move forward by indicating that I would pay $0 for six months of displayed data. That’s when I got the error prompt indicating that I still needed to make a “choice.” Apparently, “Free” is not a valid choice.  I had to log out and back in to circumvent this deceptive screen.

Commerce bank ripoff 2

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Avatar of grumpypilgrim
    grumpypilgrim

    I was a customer of H&R Block until I got tired of them burying their fees on the back of the last page of my statement, presumably in the hope that customers wouldn’t notice them. God help us if Wall Street ever gets its greedy Mitts on our Social Security money.

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