A putative class action lawsuit filed Thursday seeks damages from Bank of America for allegedly opening accounts without customers' knowledge and then charging penalties for failing to maintain minimum balances or pay required fees.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in North Carolina, came days after BofA agreed to pay $250 million under a settlement agreement with federal regulators — $150 million in fines and $100 million to customers — for improperly charging extra fees, withholding rewards and opening unauthorized credit-card accounts.
The bank neither admitted nor denied the regulators' allegations.
The lawsuit, which references the settlement, seeks damages for BofA banking customers who had unauthorized accounts opened for them from Jan. 1, 2012, through Dec. 31, 2022.
"BoA's customers have been discovering an alarming fact: that their bank, the second largest bank in the country, had inexplicably opened accounts for them without their authorization or knowledge," the complaint reads.
"It recently came to light that, in order to maximize the number of products sold, and thus maximize BoA's profits, BoA routinely — and shockingly — opened consumer accounts for products without the consumer's authorization or knowledge.
"Then, when customers fail to maintain mandatory account balances or pay fees for accounts that they did not know existed, BoA charges the consumer penalties and/or other fees," the complaint alleges.
BofA also profited from opening unauthorized accounts "by being able to artificially inflate their 'new accountholder' statistical metrics on their Securities and Exchange Commission reporting," the lawsuit says.
