Dear Credit Card Company:

The BBQ Pit
1

A couple of things.

One, I accept that you have some enormously detailed personal profile of me. If this ever starts to bug me too much, I’ll start paying for everything with cash and move to a cabin in Montana with no electricity or running water. In the meantime, if you’re going to profile me, could you please at least do so competently? Don’t put some sort of security hold on my account because of a charge that’s completely identical to one you cheerfully accepted last month, and the month before that, and every month for the last year and a half. If “NFI*Netflix - Watch TV Shows Online, Watch Movies Online” sets off the Red Alert Klaxon and the flashing strobe lights down at the Security Department at MegaCorp HQ, why didn’t it do that the first two dozen times it showed up? The barn door is wide open and the horses are nowhere to be seen. The horses are off running wild and free on the open range, a thousand miles away.

Of course, when Netflix sent me the plaintive e-mail that my credit card was no longer working, stupidly enough, I never called you guys down at the Credit Card company. I re-entered all my billing info on the Netflix site a few times, I called Netflix (“Gosh, it’s just saying the card wasn’t accepted. Did you try re-entering everything?”) and then eventually I gave up and provided Netflix with a different credit card. Why didn’t I ever call the Credit Card People?

Well, that brings me to point two: If you think there’s some suspicious activity on my card, here’s how it works–you call me at my home telephone number (which you have on file). I almost certainly don’t actually answer, so you leave me a voicemail: “Hi, this is MegaCorp Security Department, calling because of some possibly suspicious activity on your MasterCard account. Please call us back right away at 1-800-blah-blah-blah!” Then I call you back, from my home telephone number (which you have on file) and you confirm I’m really me (and I being a nasty suspicious sort have verified this 800 number I’m calling is really MegaCorp and not Scammers ‘R’ Us) and you say “Mr. Buckner, we just need to confirm that this order you placed using your MasterCard to have $1,000 worth of collectible Hummel figurines shipped to an address in Lagos, Nigeria, was legitimate”. I either say “Holy fuck, no! Please cancel my card and send out a new one to my home address (which you have on file) right away! Thanks for catching that!” or I say “Oh, yeah, that’s legit. Those are for my cousin in the Peace Corps–God only knows why she likes those things.” I have had this happen both ways in the past, with different accounts–at least once I had the Credit Card People call me, and the charge was some web site I’d never heard of, and they cancelled credit card 1234 5678 9012 3456 and sent out 1234 5678 9024 6802 a few days later; and another time it turned out, that, oh yeah, I really had just bought an AK-47 at Billy Bob’s Pawn Shop, and they were all “OK, thanks and sorry to bother you”. Either way, fine, a well-oiled machine doing its work, protecting me (and MegaCorp) from fraudsters.

What you don’t do is put my credit card on Double Secret Probation, whereby you randomly accept most things, but every once in a while you equally randomly decline some charge (a charge completely identical in every way to twelve other charges I already made and paid for in the last year using this card). See, this is why I spent the last couple of months thinking Netflix had lost their minds, and never bothered to call you–I mean, the trouble had to be on the Netflix end, right? There obviously wasn’t anything wrong with the card, right? After all, I’d made umpteen charges that same week, and they were all going through, and they all showed up when I logged on to your website, and I checked and re-checked my address and all my other information on file at the credit card website, so, hell, must be Netflix for some reason just decided to stop taking that particular MasterCard for no good reason. Silly buggers.

Only there were those two magazine re-subscriptions–that I had sent back in the mail, with my signature and everything, not online, to magazines that I’ve been subscribing to for probably twenty years now, and have almost certainly renewed in the past using this credit card–that had mysteriously never showed up on my account. And then today I went to give someone some money online, an amount of money equal to amounts of money I’d given those exact same people at that exact same website at least four times in the last year, most recently in December, and you never had a problem with it. And it kept saying “credit card declined”. Got all six hundred digits of the account number correctly entered, verified the three Sooper Secret Digits from the back of the card, verified the expiration date, verified I know my own home address and I hadn’t fat-fingered my ZIP Code and I hadn’t misspelled my own name, logged on to the credit card website to make sure I hadn’t for some reason suddenly become persona non grata or had my account frozen by Homeland Security or anything like that. So, finally, I called the Credit Card People. And found out about the Double Secret Probation, and confirmed that, yes, that was all really me, both the charges you randomly accepted and the charges you’ve been randomly declining for, apparently, several months now. So I guess the Double Secret Probation has been lifted and you’ll stop randomly declining charges without actually bothering to notify me or anything like that.

But, well, what the fuck, huh? As noted, it’s not like any of these charges were at all out of line from how I’d been using the credit card in the past. It’s not like I recently took up on-line gambling or established a business partnership with someone at the Nigerian Ministry of Finance. And even if something did set off your Distant Early Warning line, then call me, send me a letter, throw a brick through my window with a note wrapped around it, hell, just lock down the card altogether until I contact you–don’t start just randomly declining some of the charges, while allowing most of them to go sailing blithely on through, because that is an utterly retarded way to deal with an account that you (for some idiotic reason) think is having some sort of security problem.

2

::applauds::
That was an awesome rant.

3

If I may append my own story on this theme:

I was traveling in Prague with my fiance and there happened to be an ATM for her bank. She has an account at this bank which she rarely uses, but keeps because they tend to have ATMs in unusual places. So she puts her card in the machine and immediately a message pops up: “This card has been confiscated to prevent fraud.” End of story. No more card. Legitimate user is fucked. Fortunately we had other means of getting cash, but what an idiotic way to prevent fraud. Steal the card?! It reminds me of the Chinese police who used to steal our bicycles if we failed to lock them up in order to prevent bicycle theft.

4

Why anyone even bothers having a credit card at all (as opposed to a debit or secured-balance card) is beyond me. They’re charging you interest on YOUR OWN MONEY before you’ve even earned it! Their entire business model is based on coming up with new ways to screw their customers. They encourage impulse buying and racking up debt. I can’t see how the world is a better place for their existence.

5

I never pay interest to credit card companies. (Or annual fees for that matter.) I’ve been charging things and then consistently paying off my balance in full every month for almost half my life now. And in fact, I get a cashback discount on everything I charge on this credit card–it’s just that this particular episode of their “security” was annoyingly stupid.

6

Well, if you pay every bill by the due date, they lend you the money. And debit cards have a lower level of protection against fraud.

MEBuckner:
There’s a credit crunch going on, and banks want to reduce their loans. But marketing won’t want to disillusion their long time customers. This might explain the weaseling.

You didn’t name the bank, but I might note that BofA, though Too Big To Fail, is under a certain amount of stress.

Speaking of BofA, their collections arm continues with the usual misleading claptrap, despite copious injections of taxpayer funding.

So the banking crisis is actually Theresa Hatt’s fault. Huh. And I thought it was piss-poor lending practices.

This wasn’t a rogue agent, btw: the telephone correspondent appeared to be working off of a script.

7

I’m in Cambodia thanks to frequent traveler miles earned by using my credit card. For $35 a year I get a US companion ticket (that I always use and that saves me at least $60) and these miles. I pay the balance every month and have never paid interest. So far, they have not screwed me in the way the OP describes, but have behaved as the OP so nicely requests. These latter points are the topic of this thread, yes?

8

I too have been treated nicely by my cc company, at least to this date.

Should we disclose the names of our banks?

9

Well, this begs the question: If you can afford to pay off your balance every month, why are you paying their yearly fee to charge ANYTHING, when your bank would let you debit it for free?

10

I don’t pay a yearly fee. They pay me (that is, I get a “cash back”, a small discount on everything I charge that gets deposited into my savings account twice a year).

I’ve never paid an annual fee on any credit card I’ve ever had.

11

For the record, I do the same thing. Same three credit cards for about 15 years now, pay them off every month, never paid a dime in fees, they give me cash back.

12

I think I’ll print a copy of that beautiful rant and send it to CIBC VISA every time their head explodes because I have a Canadian credit card with a UK address and I’m trying to pay my hotel bill in Austria. It’s been 5 years since I moved here. Put a note in your file that sometimes I go places and need to spend money ffs!

13

No, that is why you have a financial model that estimates your bad debts. If people dying is the perfect example of a bad debt you should have been compensating for in your model, you deserve to go bankrupt.

AAARGH!

My favorite credit card trick is the “hold the payment past the due date so you get a late charge.” I’m doing EFT - its trackable. I know your bank got the payment on the 12th, it was due on the 14th, why are you telling me it was late!

14

I always have to pay an annual fee even though I never have a balance.

15

Then you need to do some shopping around for a new credit card (unless your particular credit card gives you benefits that are worth more to you than the annual fee).

ETA Didn’t notice that you’re Australian - aren’t no-annual-fee cards available Down Under?

16

Hell if I know- I never use them (virtually). So I will shop around- when I can get off my fat arse.

17

A message that included the 800 number would sound to me like a phone-phishing scam. Something that asked you to call the number on your credit card without including the number in the call would eliminate that risk and sound more legitimate.

18

I would have just given a canned-meeble-processed-word-product reply to the effect that it would be handled during the disposition of the estate. (Which is true enough – either the estate has the resources and obligation to pay off this debt, or not.)

19

Other than AMEX or people with shitty credit, who the hell pays an annual fee?

20

True. IIRC, the Credit Card People did include an 800 number the times they called. I think it wasn’t even the same 800 number as the one on the back of the card–so I called the one on the back of the card instead (for the very reason you suggest), but sure enough, they said, “Oh, yes, the Security Department did need to talk to you; I’ll transfer you over to them now”. So, they could tighten up their procedure a little there, but still not as stupid as the Double Secret Probation thing.