Credit Card Reality?
Over at CBS they noticed that the credit card rules are changing.
The new rules, approved by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration, will allow credit card companies to raise interest rates only on new credit cards and future purchases or advances, rather than on current balances.
The new rules prohibit:
- Placing unfair time constraints on payments. A payment could not be deemed late unless the borrower is given a reasonable period of time, such as 21 days, to pay.
- Placing too-high fees for exceeding the credit limit solely because of a hold placed on the account.
- Unfairly computing balances in a computing tactic known as double-cycle billing.
- Unfairly adding security deposits and fees for issuing credit or making it available.
- Making deceptive offers of credit.
Under the new rules, credit card lenders will be required to apply any payment above the minimum to the part of the balance with the highest interest rate.The so-called subprime cards for people with low credit scores typically have no more than a $500 credit limit but require a large upfront fee.
The rules cap that fee at 50 percent of the credit limit and allow the cardholder to pay off the initial balance over a year, not immediately.
But, they can’t rush into this, so the changes don’t take effect until July of 2010, so the lobbyists have plenty of time to get Congress to negate the changes.
10 comments
Those rules should have been changed a long time ago. Waiting another year is ridiculous. The credit card companies are a bunch of crooks just waiting to pounce.
I play the game with them. My cards are the “rewards” type that give you points and cash rebates. But I can see how easy it would be for some people to fall into the debt trap. Just try understanding their fine print. Ha.
My Mother doesn’t have that much credit card debt, but it has been years since they made any money off of her because she keeps transferring balances to 0% offers and pays off anything that isn’t 0%.
My brother got nailed with 24% once, because his bank screwed up the automatic payment program, which created a huge mess and all of his credit card rates spiked.
They are loans sharks without the guts to admit it.
Definitely loan sharks. Last month I hit a snafu with an online payment, it didn’t post, and they added a $39 late fee. First time I ever missed one and the fee is that high? So.. I called and asked them to remove it or I was canceling the card. They removed the entire fee. I suppose not everyone gets that lucky. I must have spoken with the one nice employee at the call center.
I think some of them are starting to panic as they are losing the paying customers and only keeping people who can’t switch. Unless I know I messed up, I fight every fee they try to add.
If they would just maintain a reasonable rate, you wouldn’t mind an occasional fee, but when they try to use any excuse to jack up the rate, to hell with them.
There was a report on a currant affairs program last week about a new company that has developed software they use to detect banking and credit excess charges and errors. They are so confident they will find them in a typical annual statement (or a years worth of quarterly statements etc), they give you $200 cash when you sign up with them. The report said that they had them check several peoples statements, and the average excess charging they found was over $300. One was $1,400! The banks involved refunded them all. The company acts on your behalf, and take back the $200 plus a small fee and you get the rest. They did say that most are genuine (kinda) *clerical* errors.
Yeah, right, like a couple of months ago when the phone company figured out that they had neglected to include the standard charge for long distance to my Mother’s phone bill, and not only added the $4.95 to the next bill, but a $5 late charge. They were charging her $5 for not paying for something that wasn’t on the bill.
When I called, the guy I talked to was totally confused. He refunded the $5 immediately, but couldn’t understand why the long distance fee wasn’t on my Mother’s original bill as she had been paying it for years. I suggested that he just flag everything Whiskey Tango Fox and send it to billing and IT.
My Housemates daughter just got married and is due to have a baby any time. She received a rather severe debt collection notice from D&B on behalf of Telstra or a lot of money. Apparently, after we finally worked it out, it was for a phone that she ordered two years ago and never received, pluss all the charges and fines accumulated since. Telstra issued her a new phone and after some messing about for 6 months, finally canceled the first service and sent her a statement showing no money owing. And this D&B debt account notice was for that. Of course, she tried sorting it out with D&B, but they wouldn’t budge. D&B personnel actually became abusive on the phone, and even hung up on her when she began crying in frustration. Teslstra didn’t know which way was up as usual, so we went to the Telco Ombudsman and the ACCC, who issued a 10 day notice to Telsta to sort it or else. The next day Telstra magically found the supposed account in error, acknowledged there was indeed no amount owing and didn’t know why D&B were hounding a woman due to have baby that didn’t need the stress over an account that had been long settled. D&B would still have none of it and Telstra said they couldn’t do anything!! Back to the Ombudsman etc… By this time, I decided to look up the manager who’s name was on the account notice. Discovered his profile on one of those business network forums, found he’d only been out of Uni with a BA for a few years and was an arrogant prat. I wrote up a very severe legal letter stating that he would be held personally liable, as well as D&B, and responsible for any problems my friends daughter had during the remainder of her pregnancy as a result of his failure to do proper due diligence and we would also sue them for attempted extortion and fraud for attempting to fraudulently collect monies for an account that had been settled over 1.5 years previously, and for their lack of compassion and lack of any kind of customer service. And I cc’d it to D&B HQ and ACCC, Telstra etc. 🙂 I also stated that it would take more than an apology for the matter to remain out of court and out of the media. 🙂
They have been falling all over themselves the past week! LOL She may get a free phone service for life out of it. They have been trying to have anew phone line installed at the farm they have and Telstra has been giving them the run around. I suggested they fix that pronto! 😉 Telstra shareholders really don’t need any more bad press or legal action.
As for Dunn & Bradstreet, they really need to get their act together for company that was once regarded as a serious player. Next thing you know, they’ll be going to peoples homes with baseball bat’s and lead pipes, if they don’t already.
They should all be taken out and used as shark bait.
Holy crap, Kryten. What a story. Have you thought of posting it on The Consumerist? You probably will have a raft of similar stories being told. Corporations are starting to realize their greed has good and truly killed the golden goose….
And the customers are really pissed.
Hi ellroon, 🙂
I’ve also told my friend to watch her credit rating witch is/was very good. If it drops, then D&B will get issued a serious ‘please explain in court’ formal legal letter. And my friends name wasn’t even spelled correctly on the claim, and it wasn’t delivered to her current address (where she has lived over a year)! At first, my friends couldn’t figure out if it was even intended for her as as far as she knew… she didn’t owe Telstra anything (She uses a pre-paid plan). Then D&B had the nerve to ask us for her address, as the original claim was sent to her mothers address (which is where she was living 2 years ago and has since moved twice. She has always had her phone service with Telstra, and they have her address.) Telstra apparently wouldn’t give D&B her new address, which I would have thought might have been a clue for D&B. If she really did owe Telstra money, I am certain they would have given D&B all the details.
They are certainly crooks, but they are very incompetent crooks.
My friends just want to leave it and forget it now. Thought I would have been happy to post it at The Consumerist and anywhere and everywhere I could! 🙂
And yeah… the customers are SERIOUSLY pissed! 🙂
This is a major problem with outsourcing, the customer is talking to another company when conflicts need to be resolved, and you can manage a company if you don’t know what is going on with your customers.
These MBAs lack the practical experience of a fast food manager when it comes to customer relations and it is reflected on their web sites. There is always a shareholders’ link prominently displayed on the front page of the corporation web site, but you have to work to find the support link. This shows the bias for the stock market over their own market, that the management thinks they sell stock, not the actual product or service they produce.
The “Steve Jobs magic” is talking and appealing to Apple’s customers, not Wall Street analysts.
When you have an outside company talking to your customers for you, you are screwed, because the people doing the talking are interested in their bottom line, not yours. Bad customer service doesn’t generate anger against them, it generates anger against you.