Consumer complaint received 2015-12-29
Product: Bank account or service — Other bank product/service
Issue: Problems caused by my funds being low — 
Company: SUNTRUST BANKS, INC. (GA)

My wife and I have an active savings and checking account with Suntrust Bank. We began to to experience a problematic series of overdraft charges beginning in XXXX of 2013. My wife had enrolled us in an service they promoted as being able to help us with possible overdrafts to our account in order to ensure that our large bills such as rent and car payments would not be affected by a late processing deposit or refund from a return etc. Starting in XX/XX/XXXX and continuing for several months, we began to notice that purchase or payments made over the course of several days were processed or posted to our account in a very irregular pattern. We would pay for or purchase items on a Monday and see those post to our account sometimes as much as three or four days afterwards. What bothered us was that we would see these post to our account on the same day as purchases made several days later. An example might be where we would pay our rent on a Monday, make several purchases over the next several days and then have ALL of these transactions post on the same day incurring, several hundred dollars in overdraft fees. I made dozens of calls to understand why this was occuring and Suntrust " offered '' to refund to me XXXX or XXXX of those charges when I confronted them on their admitted practice of batching our transactions from highest to lowest instead of by date of transaction. We had never been provided information on how they would process our transactions and in what order. I evenetually was forced to de-enroll our accounts in the overdraft coverage protection and advised Suntrust over a recorded call to disallow any future transactions when our account no longer had sufficient funds for any purchase due to pending account transactions that would result in our account balance being depleted. 
Thankfully the overdraft fees APPEARED TO BE stopped and we were able to begin to recover HOW to recover from over {$2500.00} in over draft fees incurred during that time. Recently we have begun to see overdraft fees AGAIN applied to our account despite the fact that we were specifically informed that any purchase made on our account when we had insufficent funds for the purchase would be automatically denied. This has resulted in us incurring an unexplained an unknown overdraft fee amount totaling upwards of {$400.00} more dollars and in all appears to be over the last two years in excess of $ XXXX-XXXX in overall fees from Suntrust. I have included as many financial statements as I could acquire but can not gain access to those from 2013 when this all began. Suntrust informed me that the charges were due to purchases made using our " account '' and their " routing '' numbers and not through a credit/debit purchase which they would have denied. This did not make sense as neither myself or my wife have at any point given this information to the retailer 's or services that the new overdraft fees had been attached to. We have in the last two to three months incurred several hundred more dollars in " overdraft fees '' despite never being re-enrolled in any type of service offered by Suntrust, not agreeing to any such service, and having been informed that any such activity in the future would not incur overdraft fees.