ANY TIME you allow people to access your account electronically you allow them free and unfettered access. If you pay direct through your account to the power compnay or the gas compnay or whatever they have access to your account.

If you recieve your pay check or your SSA check, or your VA check or any other goverment account INCLUDING IRS direct they have access to you account.

I make every agency that pays me to pay via hard copy check.
I don't even wear a tin foil hat. I just like my privacy. I'm absolutely amazed that people have mbraced all this electronic stuff so fully and essentually given up their lives to the world.

I have a bank account for one reason and one reason only, when me wife retired from the telephone compnay one of the benifits she got was free telephone service for life. Two lines with anything and everything that can be put on then and that includes long distance in and now out of state. The fly in the ointment is you MUST have a bank account so they can subtract the $2, 911 surcharge that is not covered. I actually paid a full phone bill for three years rather than elect this option.
However after the company went back on every other retirement promise including retiremnet itself, life time health care and many many more I felt obligated to get the one benifit still available to us. Due to the nature of the account I don't keep much in it. I recently changed all the numbers and made them all non published and call blocked. That's because even though we are on the Do Not Call list, we had the old numbers long enough they were OUT THERE. I didn't think about changing the number would change the bill date. The old one was the 3rd of the month. The new one is the 28th. You guess ed it. Just recently paid the bank $35 to pay the $2 phone bill.

A while back I put some money in and paid the car insurance with the direct withdrawal option. My bad. A week later I get a notice from the bank that I'm $695 overdrawn!!!!???? I call the bank and then the insurance company, Gieco. They "asumed" I would want to pay the house insurance coming due so as they had authorization to access the account, they just did!!!! We are stilling fighting over them paying the fees the bank charged me.

When I worked at treasury we routinel used the information from direct deposit information of any federal or state check to find your account/accounts and take any monies found to satify tax odligations, without notice.

A few years ago SSA overpaid about 2 million people "due toa computer error". They went back in an dithdrew the overpaid ammount from all direct deposit accounts that they had access to. They overdrewand caused bouncced checks for over 1 million people and not only did not pay the fees but even refused to appologize.

I sent the telephone company $200. I now have a $198 credit on my account balance. I had to talk to a supervisor to have her check the "Do Not Issue A Refund" box, which happens anytime you have a credit balance for over 90 days. That way the bill/withdrawl bill never actually be sent to the bank. There was absolutely no way to remove the account info as it's a required element for service.

Nope, none of this is new and none of it should come a surprise to anybody.