Avidia Bank - Nationwide Branches

sur | Aug 16, 2019

Deceptive Sales Practices: Huge Penalties What an awakening! Without any clear statement, and nothing at all on its website, Avidia charged us 50% of the CD’s FULL TERM interest, including both paid and unpaid interest. We lost roughly 10% of the entire original deposit. Avidia's website doesn’t mention or discuss penalties at all. Looking more carefully at the CD certificate, we now see that carefully chosen trick words were used, without any warning or explanation, to enable this ripoff. The CD was for 5 years at 1.56%, not a good deal to begin with. Once the penalty of all 5 years of interest was applied, the effective rate for that CD, withdrawn 2 years from inception, was roughly negative 5%. Our preferred bank (obviously not Avidia) charges 50% of ONE year's interest as a penalty for early withdrawal of a CD. We had naively thought that was the norm, but obviously got snookered. The tricky words, appearing once on the actual certificate: "the term."