Shameless « Main Street

Shameless

The credit card industry is continuing its run at unseating the health insurance industry from its current title as “most shameless.”

The New York Times’ Haggler column:

Three years ago, the Haggler’s credit card bill seemed to stop showing up in the mail. Another month went by — no bill. The month after that, still nothing. Each month, the Haggler would call the issuer, Bank of America, and pay over the phone, then ask the same question: “Why did you stop sending me a bill?”
We’re still sending you a bill, came the company’s reply each time.

Guess what? The company was right. It just was sending the bill in a restyled envelope, with no trace of “Bank of America.” In other words, it looked like junk mail, and the Haggler kept throwing it away.
Now, the Haggler can’t prove it, but this seemed like a brilliant, low-cost way to pocket a fortune in late fees.

Digby:

The same thing happened to me. The plain brown envelope looked like it was one of those car dealership “checks” that were all the rage before the credit crisis hit. And because I didn’t realize the first month that I hadn’t gotten my bill, it created a black mark on my credit for a late payment which resulted in a cascade of raised rates on several cards.

It was clearly a sneaky trick. Yes, it’s my responsibility to know when my bills are due, but I had been in the habit of putting the bill into the “to pay” file and paying it on the following Monday. It didn’t occur to me that the bill would suddenly come in an envelope with no return address or label on it that didn’t look like a bill and so I tossed it into a junk pile and didn’t look at it right away.

And that’s what people are dealing with all the time as consumers, with their health insurance, their credit cards, their mortgages, their pensions — overwhelming complexity designed to trip them up and cost them money or deny them benefits to which they believed in good faith they were entitled. And its all perfectly legal — or at least there’s no visible accountability for it.

I recently heard of a few variations on this – in one case, a credit card company moved its payment due date up by just a couple of days. If you paid close attention to your bill, or paid early anyway, no problem. But if you had a routine where you paid the bill close to the due date, you’d get hit with a late fee.

They will never police themselves. They will always try to find every loophole in every law to wring a few more bucks out of their customers. The only thing for it is for Congress to legislate and legislate hard against them, then keep a watchful eye and plug up the loopholes as the companies find them.