Your Uber Insufficient Fund Fee May Be Wrongly Assessed

Provided you own a smart phone, life in the industrialized world couldn’t be more convenient. There are applications to pay for car rides, parking fees, bicycle use, toll roads, city-owned bicycle use and even miscellaneous owed money to friends.

Using some of these debit card-based applications can trigger an overdraft charge at your bank, however. As an example, paying for a single car ride might cause your financial institution to assess an Uber insufficient fund fee.

According to NBC news, a class action Uber insufficient fund fee lawsuit has recently been filed in California Superior Court in Los Angeles.

The complainant, Monah S., is accusing Bank of the West of levying an Uber insufficient fund fee against her checking account for each ride out of several which she arranged through the car ride company.

An Uber insufficient fund fee purportedly should not be assessed by the bank, because car rides are not paid for on a regular-interval recurring schedule. Uber car rides are paid for by pre-entering debit card information into the smart phone application and then are processed individually per service.

This payment method is different from a recurring transaction, such as that of a gym membership which is debited from a checking account by contract on the same day each month.

According to NBC, the Uber insufficient fund fee lawsuit states that Monah was charged a $35 overdraft charge more than once when using the services of the car ride company which is not based on a monthly subscription but per use.

Counsel for the plaintiff has indicated that his client opted out of paying for overdraft protection through Bank of the West. Her bank and other financial institutions are disallowed by law from levying overdraft charges against the express wishes of their patrons. Doing so violates California statutes unless the charge is a regular-interval, subscription-based debit.

An Uber insufficient fund fee assessment often occurs because either the car ride company or the bank or credit union misclassify the service cost.

Counsel goes on to say, according to NBC, that Bank of the West and any other financial institution should simply deny the transaction at point of sale in lieu of slapping overdraft charges on a customer that has denied overdraft protection.

If you can’t afford to pay for overdraft protection through your bank, it is unlikely you can afford to routinely have insufficient fund fees assessed on your account.

Early this year, Bank of America chose to settle class action litigation for charging overdraft fees for individual rides with Uber. The banking giant closed the deal with an offer of $27.5 million in the interest of saving further court costs over the legal long haul.

This settlement might have helped patrons of this bank and Uber but won’t reimburse users of other applications such as Lyft, Venmo, GrubHub or iTunes. App users report that misclassification by financial institutions or the applications themselves is a common problem across the board.

If you have been unfairly charged recurrent overdraft fees for single-use service applications, you deserve to be compensated for this unfair loss of funds. A consultation with a knowledgeable consumer protection attorney may help you recover losses you never should have incurred.

Join a Free Uber and Lyft Bank Fees Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you were wrongfully charged an overdraft fee from an app or digital service even though you did not agree to allow your bank to charge you overdraft fees, you may qualify to file a recurring bank fee class action lawsuit.

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