Petition against Bank of America debit card fee goes viral

Story by The Takeaway. Listen to audio above for full report.

Bank of America provoked considerable outrage when it announced its plan to charge a monthly $5 fee to customers who use their debit cards.

One customer — or should we say, former customer — is turning her outrage into action. Molly Katchpole, 22, closed her accounts and moved to a community bank. At the same time, she launched an online petition on change.org. To say it’s drawing a bit of interest would be an understatement.

“I tried to get it out on Twitter and Facebook and within a few days it had thousands of signatures,” Katchpole said.

As of Friday morning it had nearly 224,000 signatures.

“I thought it would be good to attack this in several concrete ways,” she said.

In addition to signing the petition or changing banks, Katchpole wants customers to write letters and call the bank to let them know they’re upset.

A spokesperson for Bank of America said in a statement that the bank considered implementing this fee in 2010, but stopped it because of confusion from customers.

“We had a lot of questions from customers. We’re doing our best to answer all of them,” the statement said.

But for Katchpole, that’s not a good enough answer.

“They can explain it as much as they like, but people aren’t going to stop being upset about (the fee),” she said.

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