If you were a Georgia resident with a SunTrust checking account and the bank hit you with overdraft fees on debit card or ATM transactions, there’s cash sitting there with your name on it. You have until September 14 to claim it. No receipts, no statements, no proving anything. The bank’s own records already did that work.
If that isn’t you, read the last three paragraphs anyway. What this case says an overdraft fee really is applies to your account too.
The case is Bickerstaff v. SunTrust Bank, filed in Fulton County in July 2010. Sixteen years. The argument fits on a napkin: an overdraft fee on a small debit purchase isn’t a service charge, it’s interest on a tiny short-term loan, and Georgia caps interest. Cover a $20 card swipe for a few days, charge a flat fee for the privilege, and the annualized rate is somewhere past absurd.
SunTrust, now Truist, agreed to pay up to $240 million rather than let a court finish answering that.
Here’s the part worth reading twice. Attorneys’ fees come out of the fund at roughly $80 million, leaving somewhere near $158 million for the people who actually paid the fees. A third of the pot going to the lawyers is how a sixteen-year fight against a bank gets financed in the first place. It’s also the reason to file rather than assume your share isn’t worth the trouble. Your cut is calculated whether you claim it or not. Claiming is the only part you control.
You qualify only if all four of these are true. You had a SunTrust account that wasn’t closed before June 1, 2010. You were a Georgia citizen continuously from July 12, 2010 through October 6, 2017. You were charged at least one overdraft fee on an ATM or debit transaction of $500 or less between July 12, 2006 and April 15, 2014. And you never got that fee refunded.
Payments are pro rata, scaled to what you were charged, with a $5 floor. Real, but not a windfall for most people. File anyway.
Do this now. Notices carrying a unique ID and PIN went out to class members, so dig through your email and your mail pile for it, then file at the settlement administrator’s site. File online or postmark it by September 14, 2026. Moved house since 2017 and never saw a notice? Contact the administrator anyway. A stale address isn’t a disqualification.
Now the part that applies wherever you bank. This suit ran for sixteen years because a flat fee charged to cover a small shortfall is priced like credit and sold like a service, and banks would rather keep calling it the second thing. The fix on your own account is dull and it works: turn off overdraft coverage for debit and ATM transactions so the card declines instead of clearing. A declined coffee costs nothing. A covered one costs whatever your bank’s fee schedule says.
Do that this week, because the federal backstop you might be counting on isn’t coming. The rule that would have capped these fees got killed, which leaves the opt-out switch as your protection. While you’re in the app, move the cash you don’t spend this month out of checking and into something that pays you. Our best savings accounts list has the current leaders, and a balance that never runs near zero never triggers the fee in the first place.
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