The Consumer Financial Protect Bureau caught another bank cheating its
customers and again has secured millions in refunds to said customers.
This time it's Citizens Bank skimming off the top of customers'
deposits.Citizens Bank agreed to refund at least $14 million and pay $20.5
million in fines for shortchanging customers who made mistakes on their
deposit slips, federal regulators said Wednesday.
The bank engaged in “shoddy practices that deprived consumers of money
that was rightfully theirs,” said Richard Cordray, director of the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
From January 2008 to September 2012, Citizens Bank investigated and
fixed errors only if the discrepancy was more than $50. From October
2012 to November 2013, the bank lowered that threshold to $25.
The failure to fix errors violated the bank’s own promise in account disclosures to verify deposits, Cordray said.
About $11 million will be refunded to individual account holders, and $3
million to business accounts. In total, more than 475,000 accounts were
due refunds not because the bank couldn't do the math to correct
deposit errors, but because it refused to if it could make some money
off of them. Add another $14 million to the $10.8 billion the agency has
secured in its short lifespan for consumers cheated by the financial
industry.
That will only make all the Republican presidential candidates, as
Charlie Pierce points out, even more committed to getting rid of the
CFPB. Because how will the almighty market work if the banksters can't
game it?
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