Unless you hold a lot of money, you're at the mercy of someone actually caring to fix it, and if not an annoying and possibly expensive lawsuit
It's not I trust the bank, its just the times they've stolen under $500 from me they've more or less said 'fuck you deal with it' and after that I can just work to make the cash back a lot easier than I can sue for it. So I just closed my accounts and did that.
Fighting the banks over chump change sounds nice in theory or if you can start a class action but if not it's kind of like suing the cops, basically a wild goose errand for anyone but someone with a lot of time and a pro bono lawyer.
Somewhat related story about banks just saying "fuck you deal with it."
I left a subscription and long story short I got charged an extra $119, which was the monthly fee at the time. I reached out to the business over and over again and eventually they just said they were not refunding it unless I came back as a recurring customer, which I wasn't interested in doing. I submitted a charge back, submitting all my supporting information that the charge was extraneous beyond what I had agreed to pay, and eventually after a few months the bank (Discover) agreed with me and claimed the chargeback was settled.
Fast forward nearly a year later and boom a $119 charge pops up on my card. Discover tells me that the retailer had appealed (a process I was never notified about and didn't get a chance to respond to), that they accepted the appeal and the decision was final.
The wrinkle in this is that at the time I was in the process of digging out of a high five figures in credit card debt and this card had a ~$25k balance month to month so they were getting about $600/mo in interest from me. I called a manager and said "I have been paying this off at the rate of $2-3k/mo and plan on continuing to do so if you reverse that charge, otherwise I'm transferring the balance to another card and the interest ends today."
For whatever reason they were totally willing to throw that money away over $119, so I transferred the balance and closed the account. It is totally believable to me that they would do more or less the same thing with stealing money from cash accounts, if not intentionally then at least negligently and not taking the time to properly investigate.
Most of the mistakes I see are things like restaurants charging more than what was on the bill, and if you paid with a credit card, these are usually very easy to dispute. From actual banks, I haven't seen any problems, and yes I check whether the interest and dividend payouts are correct--they always are.
The article here is about banks defaulting customers to low-yield sweep accounts, but it doesn't look like they are actually under-paying interest. The accounts just don't pay a lot of interest. Honestly, the customer should know how much interest their sweep account pays and move that money to higher interest accounts if that's important to them. Whenever I put cash in a brokerage that I'm not going to use for a while, I always take the time to move it from the cash sweep account to an interest-bearing account. Buyer beware!
It's not I trust the bank, its just the times they've stolen under $500 from me they've more or less said 'fuck you deal with it' and after that I can just work to make the cash back a lot easier than I can sue for it. So I just closed my accounts and did that.
Fighting the banks over chump change sounds nice in theory or if you can start a class action but if not it's kind of like suing the cops, basically a wild goose errand for anyone but someone with a lot of time and a pro bono lawyer.