Regulators have fined Citizens Bank for pocketing customer deposits to the tune of mega-millions of dollars over a period of five years.
The secret shortchange policy occurred from 2008 till 2013, and was done to any of Citizens' account holders who, when depositing cash or checks, inadvertently wrote the wrong sum down!
Calculated over half a decade, that sleight-of-hand gave the rogue banking giant a mini-fortune which, according to an unidentified whistleblower, they knowingly stole one erroneous deposit slip at a time.
Now CB not only has to pay everybody back, but, because of the widespread “deceptive practice” they employed, fork over penalties worth over $20-million as well.
Federal regulators have also announced that nothing will be required of burgled bank customers to get the refunds they’re owed. Moreover, if their shortfalls resulted in overdrafts and other fees, then they’ll get those returned too, plus interest.
It’s not clear what percentage of customers actually had their savings absconded by Citizens Bank, but, according to investigators, “many consumers lost money that rightfully belonged to them.”
Auditors also discovered that those who caught the discrepancies and reported them to branch managers were falsely assured that the missing money would be properly accounted for.
In fact, though, only some deposits which were off by $50 or more ever got adjusted -- an amount that was later lowered to $25.
Evidently no customer deposit errors were corrected if less than those two sums, in an intentional cheat that, slowly but surely, let Citizens Bank pocket millions of dollars in unearned profits over time.
“We are now working with our regulators to make appropriate redress as quickly as possible,” the big bad bank’s sheepish execs have promised, after finally being outed and fined for pocketing customer deposits for half a decade.
