January 27,2009
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More Stories: Deception Exposed, Pt.1
– Stay vigilant -- Monitor On-Line.Last week we were talking about protecting ourselves from the wiles of tricky behind-the-scenes credit card billing activities that don't show up until it's too late. To review these, please refer back to the series entitled: "Your Story: Deception Exposed". Missed payments causing ‘defaults' seemed to be the biggest problem but, for many different causes. This next issue may be unique, maybe not. It involves, perhaps, some deception and some convenient oversight. ‘efain' tells of how he had assigned his wife to stay with a routine of paying on an Amex Blue credit card every month for two years before ever catching the problem. The damage was quite extensive where, a $2,000 debt turned into a $4,000 debt while still making every payment. It turned out that every payment was a month late. The way it happened was that a separate agency would call every month for the payment and the payment was always made. It turned out that this ‘other' agency was always seeking payment for the month before (unknown to the credit card holder). Even though every payment was made at the time of call, they were all a month late and penalties were adding up all the while.
The fact that all the payments were being made late was never explained to the hapless victims and was not caught for over a year. The distributed blame may have been partly caused by the credit card holder never reading the statements (they were never placing any new charges on the card and assumed all was well.). Of course, the credit card holder would have expected after all that time, to be informed of this damaging pattern.
The agency making the phone call every month was always stating that the payments were caught up each month. (These were late payments. The next regular payment was already due, but not as a late payment.) It was never explained to the victims that this ‘other' agency was only in charge of ‘late payments' and that the APR had already been jacked to the max and late penalties were being tacked on again each and every month. ALWAYS check your monthly statements and be leery of the credit card lender showing mercy. Online monitoring is even better because a consumer can often get a ‘heads-up' on trouble in time to do something about it.