The only class actions you see right now are about products you buy in stores so don’t sign arbitration agreements, plus securities fraud since you don’t sign an agreement with a company when you buy its stock. (You can’t sue your stock broker or financial adviser for fraud however, no matter how bad, since you do sign a contrast with them, which of course includes arbitration.)

There used to be a lot of class actions against banks and cell phone companies. Now there isn’t, and they can violate the law and common morality all they want.

The overdraft fee scam was the absolute worst.

Say you start with $100 in your account, and in the morning buy 5 things with your debit card for $5 each, and in the evening buy one thing for $97.

You had sufficient funds in your account for the first five purchases, and only went over your limit with the last purchase. But all the major banks would charge your day’s transactions from high to low, not the order they occurred. So your account would look like this

$100 -97
$3 – 5 $35 overdraft fee
-2 -5 $35 overdraft fee
-7 -5 $35 overdraft fee
-12 -5 $35 overdraft fee
-17 -5 $35 overdraft fee

So instead of getting a single $35 fee, you’d have a total of $175 in fees for your single mistake of going $17 over your limit at the end of the day. Also, perversely, this would not happen if you made the final purchase the next day.

This is not the way banks did things at first, but a software company came up with this idea, and then did some studies to market software to reorder transactions to banks.

The class action settlements over this practice resulted in most banks both changing their practices and giving most or even all the excessive fees back. The amounts in total exceeded $5 billion, showing just how much of a windfall this practice of screwing people too poor to keep much money in their account was to banks.

Labor law class actions are starting to disappear too. The California Supreme Court recently said one type of a labor class action, called PAGA cases, are not technically private class actions but more like private law enforcement, so cannot be sent to arbitration. There is a decent chance the US Supreme Court will reverse it, and that will mark the end of employers having to care about following labor laws since it is so easy to make arbitration a condition of employment.

A class example of a phone company scam is that AT&T, which decades ago rented phones to people when it was illegal to use your own phone, continued to charge people $2 a month to rent a phone. And these are just basic slimline phones that cost $8, but AT&T was charging $24 a year to rent. Eventually this became too sleazy even for AT&T, so it sold its phone rental business to a dedicated group of sleazeballs who continued the practice.

All the people victimized by the practice are necessarily elderly since they would have had to have a contract with the phone company starting in the early 70’s or earlier. One victim was my grandmother, who had been paying $4 a month for two phones for something like 30 years. So she paid about $1500 for two $8 telephones. She never noticed this on her bill with her bad eyesight and all the other little random charges. Also, she had no idea what phones they were for, as she had the same two cordless phones forever.

My aunt just discovered this about 3 years ago when she happened to randomly look at my grandmother’s phone bill.

Another scam practiced by “respectable” giant companies, like Allianz for example, is to go to retirement communities and have a talk with an “financial adviser” with lots of free food. The adviser then scopes out the audience, and looks for a mark, the ideal one people an old person with assets who is a lonely and trusting. They will then get them to mortgage their paid off house to buy annuities that feature a 10% commission and a huge surrender charge, often another 10%, plus features that make it more likely the holder will get hit with the surrender charge. Sometimes the same is done with life insurance.

Check my post above. These all involve situations where you don’t sign arbitration agreements. Or in the case of labor law, there is, for now at least, a very limited California-only exception for labor cases.

With cars, when you buy you sign an arbitration agreement that stops you from suing the dealer, but not the auto maker.