Customers of banks like First Hawaiian Bank may be subject to excessive or otherwise unfair overdraft fees due to deceptive tactics.

In some cases, customers may be charged First Hawaiian Bank overdraft fees to protect their account even without voluntarily signing up for such an overdraft protection program that might incur these fees.

First Hawaiian Bank headquarters are located in Honolulu, Hawaii, and it is one of the many credit union and banks involved in a recent investigation into the deceptive practices used by financial institutions across the country to charge excessive or unfair overdraft fees.

What Are Overdraft Fees?

An overdraft fee is a charge incurred when a bank customer overdraws the money in their account. Instead of leaving a customer unable to pay for an item, the bank charges an overdraft fee to cover the cost of transferring money into the account.

While these overdraft fees are a component of an overdraft protection program, some reports indicate that certain credit unions and banks like First Hawaiian may employ deceptive practices to force overdraft protection and wring its subsequent fees on unsuspecting customers.

Some banks and credit unions may be leaving out essential information about their overdraft protection programs in order to convince customers to sign up, and a current investigation is looking into First Hawaiian Bank overdraft fees to see if deceptive or unfair practices are or were used there.

Banks’ Deceptive Practices

There are a few ways in which a financial institution may trick customers into spending money through overdraft fees.

While banks are required to leave opting into an overdraft protection program up to their customers, banks may neglect to offer customers all pertinent information about overdraft practices before they make their decision.

What does this look like in practice? For instance, a customer may not know about how high First Hawaiian Bank overdraft fees really are before voluntarily singing up for overdraft protection. Other customers may not even be informed that opting out is actually an option.

Each year, billions of dollars are brought in to banks across the country from overdraft fees alone, according to reports.

Banks can use a variety of unfair overdraft practices to increase the amount they receive in fees. Some banks may purposely reorder their customers’ transactions so that the highest number of overdraft fee charges is registered.

Banks can accomplish this by deliberately processing the largest transactions first rather than the order in which they happen naturally, that is, chronologically. Processing transactions from highest to lowest rather than on a natural timeline makes each payment following that transaction more likely to overdraw the account, thereby incurring a fee.

In many cases, these overdraft practices affect the Americans who can least afford unfair fees. This is because bank customers who routinely have less money available to them in their accounts are more likely to overdraw them, and these kinds of deceptive overdraft fee practices only add to that burden.

Filing a Lawsuit Over Unfair First Hawaiian Bank Overdraft Fees

An inadequate understanding of how overdraft fees work and how banks employ them can lead to customers paying more money in fees than they would have with all the information—which is what these banks are counting on.

Some bank and credit union customers affected by overdraft fees and deceptive practices have begun filing lawsuits against financial institutions.

If you have been subjected to unfair overdraft fee practices by First Hawaiian Bank, you may be able to join a class action overdraft fees lawsuit.

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