Since I started working for a credit union’s collections department, I have bashed my head into this “problem” far too often. I don’t think there is a bank in the land that doesn’t have this agreement with Visa, Mastercard, or their ACH processor. Basically, once you give another institution your approval to take funds from your account, they can pull funds whenever they want and the bank MUST attempt to process the request — even if the account doesn’t have funds or is closed. For POS transactions, it’ll go through and put the account negative. For ACH, it’ll probably bounce but still sack someone with a fee.

Dumb as hell, I know. But the thing is, by law, any company that you authorized to charge your account in the past MUST also honor your request to stop debiting a bank account of yours. If they don’t, they are breaking the law.

PNC sounds a bit hard assed on the whole process. Where I work, we lean toward reversing fees unless the member is an outright cock or has shown reckless use of their account. We also don’t charge an investigation fee when a dispute arises. I personally hate the agreements the banks have signed that force them to honor pre-authorized charges even when an account has been closed or charged off. All the time, I see dormant accounts hit with insurance company charges and it turns out the insurance company didn’t properly switch the person’s payment source. No fun calling a customer to inform them their account is negative because some company didn’t do its job right.

Kudos to you for keeping on this and trying to remedy it, despite PNC throwing you under the bus. Do you know if they reported you to Telecheck or ChexSystems? You may want to find out. If the account was negative more than a month, they may have. If they did, you’ll have problems using checks or opening checking accounts in the future (it’s tied to your driver’s license and SSN).

They even have a Pittsburgh-specific website: http://www.pittsburgh.bbb.org

It may not get your money back, but the bank will at least have to deal with some grief. And it’s illegal to key all their cars.