Lawyers campaigning to build Australian-style class action lawsuits against banks in New Zealand over exception and dishonour fees have announced they will file legal action against ANZ next week over damages they claim could reach NZ$250 million.The Fair Play on Fees campaign was launched in March by Auckland lawyer Andrew Hooker and Australian class action specialist Slater and Gordon. It is funded by Litigation Lending Services.The campaign has signed up 25,000 bank customers, including 11,000 customers from ANZ and its now merged subsidiary National Bank, who want to participate in the class action. Hooker said the campaign estimated ANZ and National Bank had over-charged their customers by $250 million over the last six years. He called for more ANZ customers to join the action before the June 24 deadline, which is the day before legal documents will be filed in court in New Zealand."The message we want to get out to people today is they need to act now to if they want to get their unfair fees back," Hooker said.The lead plaintiff in the case is National Bank customer Sandra Cooper. She owned a cleaning business in Auckland and had been charged $1,500 in such fees for being temporarily overdrawn at various points over the last six years. She was charged $15 each time she was overdrawn."I generally only got hit with the fees when I didn't realise that my account would be overdrawn," Cooper said. "This means that I was usually overdrawn by only about $50 for a couple of days at a time. So, while the interest on the overdrafts was just a few cents, the $15 fee they charged to administer it really stung."Hooker said the $15 fee was out of all proportion to the "few cents" it cost the bank to reverse the overdraft in its electronic systems.He said the campaign planned to file a series of such actions against New Zealand's other big banks, including Kiwibank, over the coming months. It had millions of dollars of funds to support legal actions that could take years, he said.ANZ NZ's managing director for retail, Kerri Thompson, rejected the campaign's claim that the fees were unfair and said the bank would vigorously contest any legal action.Thompson said the arrival of US-style class action litigation was a sad day for New Zealand and that such fees could be justified by the costs incurred by the bank. She said they were "tiny" in relation to the bank's overall revenues and only a small proportion of customers had complained to the bank. She declined to specify the amount the bank earned from the fees.Hooker said New Zealand's banks should adopt the practices of their Australian banks, who are obliged by regulators to disclose the amounts of these fees.