Has anyone else noticed this trend? A company that provides services with a monthly bill makes it almost impossible to actually pay your bill without using their pay by phone option which costs$7-10 USD? It is really the lowest of the low slime ball behavior, making it damn near impossible to pay them your money without paying an extra fee.
My mom asked me to pay her Ford Credit car payment online for her, there are only two ways to pay by internet or by phone(which costs $$$) so I log in…your account is temporarily suspended please try again later? Well let me email and report the problem using their contact form…whoops need the Ford Credit account# and last four digits of SS# ok call and get them…whoops now before I can send it I need to answer the security question ok call and get that. Ok now it says my email will be answered by the end of the next business day which will be god knows when with July 4th coming up. Ok I’ll call customer care which whoops is closed and only available certain hours, funny that the nice woman who charges $7 USD to take my info over the phone is always there 24/7 and there are never problems on her end.
One of my moms credit cards if you chose the free payment option would literally tell you the money could be applied anytime in the next week or so, they also used bizarrely confusing language and even graphics tricks on the site to try to get you to choose the $10 premium payment service.
Another place had a online payment system that just did not work, I tried it using six different PCs with different browsers and OSs in different locations. It didn’t work on any of them, when you tried to make an online bill pay account it would say this username is already taken, for everything! We tried hundreds of combinations, even just random characters and nope everything was already taken! Phone support was totally useless, the woman would just repeat the same script over and over about how to set up an account when I would say I can’t progress past this part, she would just start over from the double u double u double u dot part:smack: My mom just ended paying the fee every month.
Her mortgage company had a similar scam going, only they charged for online payments too and the only free option was to pay by mail. The longest it ever took was around three weeks for a payment mailed to them to be applied to her account, and they were in the same state! Several times the letter apparently just dissapeared as the check was never cashed.
I can tell you that Wells Fargo is horrible for trying to make payments. I think their motto is that if they haven’t managed to get an additional $15, they haven’t done their job.
For the last three years I had a Tmobile phone, their website was completely and utterly broken. I couldn’t update my address or credit card information at all. Fortunately the credit card info kept working throughout that period, but if they’d changed, I don’t know what would have happened. People on the phone always acted astonished that the website didn’t work and said they couldn’t take the info themselves.
IIRC one or several of the low-cost airlines in Europe were dinged for this, and not allowed to offer tickets that didn’t offer at least one way to pay for them without an extra charge.
I am going through this with my new truck. It costs $10.95 to make a payment by phone, text, or internet. I can go to walmart to make a payment for $9.95. The only way there is no charge is to mail it in or automatic withdrawals from my checking account. There is NO way I am mailing it in, they say it can take 7 to 10 days to process which translates to me as we will hold your payment until past the due date so we can charge a late fee.
Call me paranoid but the last time I actually mailed a payment to a company, my check cleared the bank before the due date but my payment wasn’t processed until after the due date, and they* tried* to hit me up for a late charge.
Funny, our motor vehicle bureau charges $4 to pay by mail, but nothing if I walk up to my bank and pay it there. I’m not sure what happens if you pay in person, but I will be having to get a new photo ID next January, which requires my going there and paying in person.
It gets worse, too. First Premier (credit card company) charges you a monthly fee just to be able to log in and see what your balance is.
As for sending payments to slimeball companies in general I just use the billpay service from one of my banks. The sleazy company has to have somebody spend time to manually process it, doesn’t get the fee, and if they claim the payment didn’t arrive on time the bank will generally cover the late fee. Not that it’s ever happened to me.
Yeah, well, everybody willingly looked the other way, when PayDay Loans and their ilk, set up shop. No one seemed to care that they were skirting the usury laws, and charging, effectively, hundreds per cent interest, just by renaming it, ‘access fee’ or some other shit. No one cared because it was the poorest and most vulnerable that were getting preyed on.
How could you not see it coming, that they would becoming for us next? Did you imagine that the same government that served up the poorest, practically on a silver platter, would draw the line at watching the middle classes meet the same fate?
Consumer protection is a joke in this economic environment. The small print on tv car ads is now pages long, scrolls impossibly fast, and no human could read it as it’s so small. Ben and Jerry are selling a pint of ice cream that’s not a pint! Boston Pizza is now advertising, boneless, all white meat chicken wings!
Capitalists have turned user fees, into revenue streams. That should be illegal or tax penalized heavily. They should have to demonstrate how much it costs for each ATM transaction, if it comes out to a nickel, they shouldn’t be allowed to charge you seventy five cents. But that ain’t likely to happen, as long as the wealthiest have a segment of the population convinced that protecting them is the way to help the economy. As long as the very people who were job exporters are rebranding themselves as job creators, and some people buy into it.
It’s a crazy world, very ‘The Emperor’s New Clothing’, more illusion that reality, in my opinion!
Oh, the gouging has gotten terrible, grude! I cut up my Applied Bank credit card a year ago in part because there were three ways to make a payment, all of them bad: by phone ($12.95 service fee), by internet ($6.95), or I could mail it in, but again, what’s to stop them from holding the payment until past the due date then dinging me?
Recently, our utility, Baltimore Gas & Electric, moved to a new billing system. Aside from the comedy of billing errors that BGE refuses to admit, their new system does not accept Visa as a form of payment. Really?? Who doesn’t accept Visa, especially a utility company for one of the most dense population centers in the country? “Well, for $9.95 you can pay through one of our many payment locations.” We were forced to sign up for online bill-pay through my girlfriend’s bank just to pay the damned electric bill without a fee.
Just when you thought businesses couldn’t become any more unscrupulous, they go and raise the bar.
Most US banks have an online bill payment service that is free. Some banks change a small monthly fee, some charge a very small per transaction fee. These services are typically built on a “pay anyone” model. For ten of thousands of merchants, the banks (or their billpay service provider) have an electronic payment relationship established, and you can schedule the payment through your online banking site. The debit and credit are then processed on the scheduled day electronically. For smaller payees who don’t accept electronic payments, your bank or their provider will send a paper check. Using your bank allows you to bypass the payee’s fee-charging payment site.
I love my credit union more every day. I have a car loan through my credit union. To make payments, I simply log in to my account and transfer funds from my checking account to my car loan. I also have a Visa through the credit union. Same process for paying them. No charge for either one.
That’s amazing, I thought Chase was terrible for charging ~$3 to post an online payment in 2-3 days instead of 5-6 days. This is an online payment coming straight out of my checking account, there’s no reason they shouldn’t have been able to take it out as soon as I hit Submit. I canceled my credit card with them because of that, I should be able to log in several days before my payment is due and feel comfortable they will take my damn money right then and there.
I agree, but credit unions aren’t perfect either. A friend of mine found that our local credit union compounds interest on savings accounts quarterly instead of monthly. That’s a big difference.
I’ve never had this with Chase - I typically log on the day the payment is due, pay them and as long as it’s before 5 PM Mountain time (I think - it may be 8 PM), it posts that day, and usually hits my checking account within 24-48 hours.
I have nothing to say regarding the rest of your post, but this is not true. In fact, B&J proudly says on their ice cream that they are STILL a full pint.
Other ice cream companies, however, pull that shit.
I believe, it says pint, but if you look closely at how many grams, (or whatever you people use!), you’ll see a problem there. Or perhaps it’s only in countries where they have to convert to metric? I could be misremembering, and retract if I am in error, with apologies!
I recently got a parking ticket. I thought, “Well, that sucks but no big deal. I’ll pay it on their website when I get home.”
I was not aware just how difficult they would make this process. They don’t accept Visa, which struck me as dumb but I’ve got a Discover card so I didn’t have a problem with that. But then their online service was down. Well, not too big a deal, I’ll just wait a few days and come back to pay it when this has been fixed. Except they never fixed it. So I called to make a payment over the phone only to be told that I can’t make a payment over the phone. I could go to the town hall to pay it (which I won’t because they are more than an hour away from where I live) or I can mail it in and hope that the post office doesn’t fuck it up. So yesterday I wrote a check and signed the ticket and made front and back copies for my records before dropping the check in the mail. I can’t wait to see if they actually recieve and process my check before the 30 days are up and I am further penalized.
I swear, the only way they could have made this more difficult would be to require that the ticket be paid in Euros.
I use my checking account on line to pay most bills. Especially the companies who try and screw a few dollars out of you, and/or insist that I let them take money out of my checking account.
Well let me email and report the problem using their contact form…whoops need the Ford Credit account# and last four digits of SS# ok call and get them…whoops now before I can send it I need to answer the security question ok call and get that. Ok now it says my email will be answered by the end of the next business day which will be god knows when with July 4th coming up. Ok I’ll call customer care which whoops is closed and only available certain hours, funny that the nice woman who charges $7 USD to take my info over the phone is always there 24/7 and there are never problems on her end.