I got a credit card in the mail today from Chase. I had no idea that this account existed and I don’t need a thicker wallet (well, thicker with cash would be nice, but not thicker with plastic), so I called them up to cancel. I expected the agent to ask me why I wanted to cancel, offer me a higher credit limit, or make some other attempt to retain me as a customer. Instead, he said “Thank you. We’ll notify the credit reporting agencies within 30-60 days that this account has been canceled.”
4 thoughts on “The banks are still scared of the American consumer”
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I was shocked to find the same thing when I cancelled my cable service last year. We switched from Cablevision to FiOS, and the customer service representative didn’t even bother to ask what our reason for cancelling was (price, channel outages due to contract negotiation breakdown).
The only explanation I could think of is that the cable companies have become complacent from operating in near-monopolies in their respective markets, so they have no idea how to act when there is actually competition.
Unfortunately, his doesn’t explain your Chase experience.
Banks/credit card companies are a bunch of sore losers. When the “credit crisis” hit–largely created at their own hand–Citibank decided to cancel two of my long term, high limit, zero balance cards. This presumably knocked my credit score down a few notches. THEY overextended THEIR credit, and my credit suffers as a result.
In the past two months, I’ve placed several orders from Newegg.com. Each time, Bank of America’s “fraud department” refuses the charges, delaying the order, and requires me to spend 10 minutes to straighten this out by placing a call to their “automated” fraud system. This system is automated for them, but for me is much slower–requiring the entering of touch tone information and wading through various phone menus.
Late last night, it happened again. Call the bank to approve the charges after getting an email from Newegg and the bank. Call Newegg to have them re-run the charge. Get ANTHER call from Bank of America for the exact same vendor, and the exact same amount I explicitly approved three hours previous! “We have detected unusual activity on your account…” In three months, FOUR of the SEVEN charges I’ve made on the card were from Newegg!
I called to speak to a person, to see if I could prevent this hassle in the future. I’m all for fraud prevention, but this is plain silly and annoying. The Bank of America representative says that Newegg is a “problem” vendor. Naturally, the robot I was speaking to was empowered to do nothing except make a note in “the system.” This clearly won’t help as this system is completely automated. If a person had anything to do with the process, hopefully they would’ve noticed that I approved the order three hours before it decided to call again.
So, there is some kind of issue with Newegg and Bank of America, and the consumer is left to solve it each and every time a transaction takes place? Fantastic!
That is interesting. I have ordered several things from Newegg as a Bank of America customer and have not received any hassle to date.
Newegg is of course one of the top online vendors for computer parts. (both in volume and ratings).
The only thing I can think of that would throw Newegg into BOA’s “problem” vendor list is this:
Newegg will not allow me to use any other mailing address but the address on the account for the credit/debit card. So I cannot have newegg parts shipped say to my job where I can sign for some of the expensive ones.
When I broached this to Bank of America they were pretty inflexible and suggested I change my address of the credit/debit card to my office and then change it back after I received my package!
Since the fraud dept at BOA cannot even keep my current phone numbers straight, i elected to skip this and continue to have my shipments sent to my home. Maybe they have had too many complaints about not being able to ship to a separate address.
This may not be as merely cavalier as it seems: ‘Instead, he said “Thank you. We’ll notify the credit reporting agencies within 30-60 days that this account has been canceled.”’
Years ago, I had to replace the transmission of my VW car after rocking it hard enough to drive away from stuck-in-a-snowy-ditch after a back-country ski day. I got a Bank of America credit card to pay for the one-time cost & cancelled it after the new transmission was paid-for, with every payment made on time.
And for more years, my credit report showed that B of A had cancelled my credit card, to the detriment of my credit rating. Since I was busy & didn’t much need a credit rating at that time, I just outlived the reporting statute of limitations. But a person might want to see if there is a cancellation-category other than “bank cancelled.”