title:  Big Banks Fleeced The Working Poor Out Of $11.16 Billion In 2015
text: If you are or ever have been a member of the working poor, you have probably been screwed over by your bank. Maybe you were out of gas or milk or needed medicine and you didn t have enough money in your account, but you really, really needed something so you swiped your debit card and were hit with an overdraft fee   you are not alone. Millions of Americans are charged these fees, usually about $35 (in my experience). So many people are hit with these fees that they are very profitable for big banks. A new report has found that financial institutions made more than eleven billion dollars from these fees in 2015, alone.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)   established by Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2010   issued the report and found that 594 banks (worth more than $1 billion) fleeced the American people out of $11.16 billion last year.Some of the highlights the CFPB reported about overdraft and nonsufficient funds fees:Overdraft fees are one of the most predatory practices of big banks. Many of you have probably been hit by a bunch of overdraft fees at once. Say you go to the store and you buy that gallon of milk, but other transactions haven t cleared in your account yet. That gallon of milk may cause you to incur multiple overdraft fees because the banks use  fee-harvesting  software that reorganizes your transactions so that they can charge you multiple times.These shady practices are one of the reasons banks are now required to disclose their overdraft fee profits. Elizabeth Warren had a big role in these new rules because of her crusade to save the middle class and the working poor from Wall Street s love of exorbitant consumer fees. In 2012 Warren said: People enroll in overdraft programs to avoid bouncing checks, but too many of them get stuck owing hundreds of dollars in unexpected fees for services they never wanted and didn t know they had,  said Warren, one of the nation s experts on bankruptcy and consumer credit.   The new consumer agency is heading in the right direction to make sure that people have the tools and information they need to avoid these traps. The establishment of the CFPB has helped, in 2012 banks made three times as much ($32 billion) in fees from customers. But for the working class families who are struggling to survive, it s still not enough. We need real reform and banks because it is a huge problem when Wall Street s business model is  rob as many families as we possibly can. Featured image via Flickr