Consider a venn diagram containing "people smart enough to game GameStop into being their bank", "people not smart enough to avoid overdrafts", and "people not creative enough just to set up a prepaid debit card system for themselves". In the overlapping space of these three circles, you'll find this guy, and a very confused leprechaun riding a unicorn.
Remember that historically, banks have processed transactions in whatever order is most likely to produce an overdraft, even if the same set of transactions, processed in chronological order, would not produce an overdraft. Also note that the complaint is not that he overdrafted, but that he can't turn off the overdraft "protection" that charges him a fee -- he'd rather just have the transaction declined, and can't get his bank to do that.
I am fairly certain that it is illegal not to allow disabling of overdraft protection.
When I went to my old bank's branch, I asked for it to be turned off, and they said "We need a letter written to this effect."
I asked for a piece of paper, addressed the branch manager, and asked in a sentence to disable it for my account.
They seemed perturbed that I would do this while the line was waiting behind me, but frankly, it's their policy.
Most big banks have done this for a while and only recently abandoned or are abandoning the practice. I anticipate a large class-ation suit and payout within the next few years, because they took this to wildly abusive levels. For example a few years ago I went out one day and made 2 small (<$10) debit card purchases, passed an ATM of my bank and made a cash deposit, and then made a larger purchase an hour later (which was why I had deposited the cash, as I had a low balance). Chronologically this was all good, but thanks to transaction re-ordering I got hit with $105 in fees (#35 x 3).* I got it reversed, but the sad fact is that for a long time the transactions shown on your account and your available balance were treated as fictions to be re-arranged at the bank's convenience if doing so would yield fee income.
* eg for illustration, though I don't remember the specifics:
a. starting balance $30
b. debit card -$10 = $20
c. debit card -$10 = $10
d. cash deposit +$60 = $70
e. debit card -$65 = $ 5
Which all looked fine at the time (eg checking recent transactions and available balance at ATM following deposit), but 24 hours later the transactions had been reordered from smallest to largest and my account looked like this:
a. starting balance $30
e. debit card -$65 =-$35
A. Overdraft fee! -$35 =-$70
d. cash deposit +$60 =-$10
b. debit card -$10 =-$20
B. Overdraft fee! -$35 =-$55
c. debit card -$10 =-$65
C. Overdraft fee! -$35=-$100
I wish I were making this up, but sadly not. I was just lucky enough to have the smarts and time to go into a branch and browbeat a manager into getting the charges reversed. However, my understanding is that millions of people have been ripped off by this trick in recent years.
It's not the order most likely to produce an overdraft, it's the order that produces the most overdrafts.
$500 - $1 - $2 - $3 - $4 - $5 - $1000 sounds like one overdraft but if it's processed in the reverse order it's 6 overdrafts.
I did this in that order in college, probably 9 years ago. Obviously the mistake was my fault, but imagine my surprise when I went online to fix it and pay the $35 fee and found that it was over $200. When I called SunTrust they told me that their policy was to process payments from largest to smallest.
This was my second overdraft, the first time my card "worked" so I assumed that there was more money in my account than I remembered (wasn't aware of overdrafts at the time).
