An acquaintance got a call from her credit card company. Someone in Europe had attempted, twice, to make purchases. They advised her to cancel her credit card and start a new account. She did. They raised the interest rate on her account to close to 30%. This is criminal. Every day, if people make on late payment, the thieves in the credit card industry will raise interest rates to beyond 30%.
Congress should a stop to all of this, while cancelling the recent bankruptcy bill that was passed as a gift to credit card companies last year. This should be very high priority, along with vote technology cleanup, habeus corpus reinstatement and universal health care.
OK. I confess. I opened an account with Bonton last month to take advantage of some deep discount sales on clothing. They sent me a bill and my mail got lost for a few days. (With two kids in the house, this stuff happens.) I went to call to take care of it and found that there was a $29 charge for the late fee. The amount due-- $10. This is outrageous. These companies are rogue operators who think they can get away with this. We have to tell our legislators that it is no longer acceptable for them to allow credit card companies and banks to rape and pillage, continually screwing their constituents. No... congressperson....... I do not accept this behavior and I expect YOU to do something about it... sooner, not later.
A few months ago, I made a minor mistake on a calculation and overdrew one checking account by about $5.00
That set into motion a cascade of charges-- and after a week, that one charge ended up producing charges of over $100-- all because of the money that was deducted from the first charge. I have a relationship with my bank and knew to go in to fight the charges... and they credited back almost all of them.
But my ex is not so bank savvy. She made a mistake that caused a charge which led to more charges, which caused bounced checks and before she knew it, she had $300 in penalty charges. It doesn't take much at $35 each, if you've written a batch of small checks for purchases and bills.
These big charges are outrageous and do not in any way reflect the costs to the banks. They are predatory profits. It is up to congress to stop them.
