Credit card fiasco!

Our goal this year is to pay off all of our stinking credit card debt so we can be rid of these financial parasites once and for all. For two days, I spent too much time and had too much frustration while using up my daytime cell phone minutes trying to sort out a problem that was caused by a lack of communication (and brains) on the part of National Geographic Chase Mastercard (our account with them is now closed and they are forever on our list of shitty shyster companies.)

NGCM has been paid off with zero balance for a couple of years, yet we keep getting these checks in the mail with a letter encouraging us to transfer our other credit card balances for a "great low fixed rate". So, my husband finally decided to take advantage of this offer and wrote one of the checks to pay off another card that had a higher interest rate (though we have been with that company for many years and have had no problems.) This should have been a simple exchange between the two credit card companies, but NO. Idiots work there, or National Geographic Chase are a bunch of scam artists.

A couple of weeks passed, and we got a letter in the mail from Chase saying that they were not going to honor the check because the amount we wrote the check for was over our limit and they were charging us a $39 overlimit fee, BUT, they were NOT going to honor the check! How can we be charged an over-limit fee when we hadn't been approved to charge any money?

The first person I talked to, Clint or whatever he calls himself for customer service calls, informed me that they did not honor the check because it was $30 over our limit...THIRTY DOLLARS. I told him that was scammish, and why didn't they just honor the check, inform us that we were over since they were going to charge an over-limit fee anyway. He said it is against "company policy." I then asked him why when a person goes shopping, and uses their plastic credit card and goes over, they honor the purchase price owed to the store the merchandise was charged at, and then bill the cardholder for an over-limit fee. He avoided answering that question and was like a damn parrot saying "company policy, company policy, company policy . . .squawk!" until I asked to speak to a supervisor. He asked me to hold. I know that most likely he did not go get a supervisor. My son did telephone work in a customer service department of a company, and when a customer asked to speak to a supervisor they ask the person to hold and just get their co-worker in the next cube to come take the call and pretend to be a supervisor, so in reality there are NO supervisors. This was obvious by the way the bitch who claimed to be a supervisor exhibited zero amount of professionalism.

I repeated my complaints to this "supervisor" and she got shitty with me! She said "well, it's your fault for not knowing what your exact limit is." I asked her why they didn't honor the check when we are talking about a mere $30...they were still going to charge us the $39 no matter what, so why not accept our business. The money they would have made in interest was far more than $30 they wouldn't approve. She said in the bitchiest voice possible, "mam, you should have checked your limit...company policy says...yadda yadda yadda." I told her she worked for a SCAM company and told her I don't know how she can live with herself with working for comany that takes advantage of people. She started to say something else and I just told her to cancel the credit cards and DO NOT send us any more checks. She said she had no control over that. So, my plan if I get anything from them at all in the mail, I am going to mark it "return to sender" unopened and let them pay the return fees.

My husband is also going to write an irate letter to the president of the company (just to make himself feel better because most likely it will get no farther than the stupid and irritating customer service representatives who don't give a shit about me or the company they work for.)

The nightmare worsens. I then decided to check out the account we were trying to pay off and saw that they had added the amount of this payoff check that was denied instead of deducting! Not once, but TWICE! I then called that credit card company. I got a girl (or a woman with a girl's voice) who didn't speak very good English and I could hardly understand her and she could hardly understand what I was trying to ask. I told her about the denied check, and asked why the math was messed up on our account...it showed that we were OVER LIMIT by $4,500 when if they received two payoff checks amounts we should have overpaid, not charging anything! She said to call the other company and find out why the check was returned twice and I tried to explain that they had to have tried to put the check through again, that the other company would not just deny it twice. She insisted I phone the other company again, which I did even though I didn't want to get stuck talking to that bitch again. I luckily got someone who was polite and listened, (though she also said there was nothing she could do about "company policy"...) I tried to make her understand that they denied the check and no money was transferred, therefore the account was always at 0 so why the over-limit fee when no money was involved. I could not make her understand, but I did find out that it was the company of the account we were trying to pay off who resubmitted the check and caused the $4,500 over-limit error on the amount we were trying to PAY OFF!

I called the company that we were trying to pay off again. I finally got someone who understood, and he said there were TWO returned check fees of $29 but he was going to take one off. (The other $29 we will pay since we wrote the check for overlimit and it's not that credit card company's fault...we will try to get that reimbursed from the asshats who caused the problem in the first place...PLUS the unfair $39 for nothing fee.)

This intelligent customer service rep realized there was a huge math error with all this check business, and as of today all is well. But it took two days to straighten things out.

So, watch out when using those checks to transfer balances. My husband and I think that if you write the check to the limit, or go over a little, they do not like that and will not honor the check. They want you to still have room to charge on at the regular interest rate. Shysters!