Consumer complaint received 2024-07-10
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Fees or interest — Problem with fees
Company: FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF OMAHA (CO)

I am writing in to open a resolution path to an issue I am having with First National Bank of Omaha ( FNBO ) Crecit Card Services managing the XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX for XXXX XXXX XXXX. 

For a period starting on XX/XX/year> to approximately XX/XX/year> ( approximation due to two pending transactions on XX/XX/year> and XX/XX/year> ) I used this card to participate in the XXXX XXXX XXXX through XXXX. 
On XX/XX/year> I logged into my FNBO account to check the balances and make a payment. During that session, I found 14 charges of {$15.00} each for a " XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX '' posted to my account. I reached out to XXXX and they indicated that those fees were not from them and to contact my card company. 

I contacted FNBO on XX/XX/year> at XXXX MT where the agent informed me about the fee and stated that there was nothing they could do to help me based on FNBO policy. I escalated to a XXXX XXXX XXXX, and they did not have the power to do anything to help with these fees. At that time, I had incurred {$210.00} in fees for XXXX purchases ( some as low as {$1.00} ) and I have two transactions pending which will bring the total up to {$240.00} dollars in the " XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX '' fees. While both the agent and manager ( XXXX ) did an excellent job explaining this, I have many concerns with this policy and the anti-consumer way that Cash Advance and " Cash Equivalency '' is implemented/executed by FNBO. 

As a consumer of a credit product, there was absolutely no indication that my transaction was subject to additional fees. I did not receive an alert via email, I did not receive an alert via a push notification to the FNBO app, and the FNBO fraud team failed to identify that this pattern of purchases was WAY out of my normal spending profile and did not alert me ( even though I DO have an alert set to notify me of ANY ATM transactions that occur greater than {$1.00} ) or place a temporary stop on my card until they could verify the transactions were legitimate. 
I asked XXXX if I could disable any and all Cash based fees on my FNBO account. XXXX stated I could call in to drop the Cash Limit from my current {$1700.00} to {$0.00} which would decline these types of transaction in the future. While this is good and I will be doing this once I have fully paid this bill ( I am currently waiting for those pending transactions and associated fees to post ), this is currently implemented in a predatory way. As a consumer of credit services, I should need to opt-in to a Cash Limit especially since it carries a hefty and static {$15.00} PER TRANSACTION fee for which FNBO has a policy that these {$15.00} PER TRANSACTION fees can not be negotiated which does not allow the agents to waive the fees in any circumstance. 

Based on what I consider a predatory experience from XXXXNBO, this is what I am requesting : 1. A Credit of {$240.00} applied to my account to reverse these fees. NOTE : I am requesting a full reversal of the entire {$240.00} because of the extraordinary steps I am being forced to take to make these complaints vs allowing agents to work with me on these fees and come to a compromise.

2. A change in policy where Cash Limits for all accounts are to be converted from opt-out, to opt-in. This should be the normal for any service/feature that carries additional fees for the consumer. 

3. Addition of an alert that consumers can subscribe to in the web portal to actively notify them when ANY card/account fees are being charged to their account. I have all transactional alerts setup and none of them notified me of these {$15.00} charges. The closest one to this situation is an alert when a " Card Used at ATM '' which I have set for all transactions greater than {$1.00}... this one did not trigger notifications on " XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX 

4. Improving the Fraud Detection to identify when an account suddenly has activity that is outside the normal spending pattern of the consumer ( in this example a large amount of small transactions that are considered cash advances/cash equivalency when their history has none of this activity. This lack of detection seems to exist to allow FNBO to capitalize on large fess that are non-negotiable which is highly anti-consumer.

5. The ability to escalate issues of this nature higher than the Call Center Manager. XXXX stated that there are people above him in the organization, however they do not talk to customers. This is an honest, but unacceptable answer. 

I am providing a copy of this letter to the FTC in my complaint against FNBO to escalate the predatory nature of these fees, and the lack of transparency to consumers by not having an alert that can be setup to notify a consumer of these fees hitting their account. 

Just to clarify my goal, I want these anti-consumer policies and processes to be fixed and to have the fees that my account incurred to be reversed due to these policies being in the state they are in today. 

Thank you and I look forward to collaborating with you to improve these policies for all FNBO consumers.