This is lengthy but might be worth reading. My husband was offered a very low interest rate from Providian some years ago. Because we were both previously married we have kept some accounts separate from each other. He opened the account as an individual account. He saw how high my interest rates were on my accounts and asked me to use this account for my purchases. I had made several large ticket item purchases. We have always been in the habit of paying off our accounts within a month or two in full. Right off the bat we were not getting our statements on time. I should have gone with my gut feeling. They blamed a sub-contractor they hired to maintain their billing. They gave us misinformation when I was put in the position of having to call to obtain the balance in order to make payments. As a result, I over paid the by thousands! Then came a compounding problem. I was sent several defective items that I returned to the merchant heavily insured with UPS tracking that needed signature before delivery. I felt this way I had some sort of proof the merchant received the merchandise back. I felt this way there should be no argument. The merchant also applied deferred payment arrangements without my consent.in other words you purchase an item from this merchant, they broke up the payments into several payments and applied them towards your account. When I did not see any credits towards my account for the returned merchandise, I was instructed to file disputes to protect myself. I had never encountered having to do this before. I was unfamiliar with how the dispute process works but I did as instructed. I sent the letters with UPS tracking slips showing signatures, copies of original invoices and all correspondence to and from the merchant. Providian ignored all of my disputes. Later a supervisor from Providian apologized and stated they did not have enough employees to handle the disputes. That this was why they had not handled my disputes but that he would look into it personally for me. It took over 1 1/2 years for Providian to finally apply partial credits towards the account. I called the merchant to ask why only partial credits and not for the full amounts? After all they admitted receiving the merchandise and broken up payments or not, the merchant received full payment by then for the merchandise they had long received back. The merchant informed me that they had credited us long ago for the merchandise in full! So where are those credits? To this date no one knows! They have never been applied towards the account. If you think this was the end of it all? Nope. I had over paid the account by about $4,000.00! Disputes or no disputes. I got so frustrated with this company, I told my husband to close the account! The last words we had with this company was that they were going to send us a check for the over payment but that it was going to take them 6 to 8 months to process it because we closed the account abruptly. This never happened! They not only kept our money but they pulled some kind of stunt when they merged with Chase Manhattan Bank! They did not inform us (I suppose since we over paid and closed the account) that they merged with Chase Manhattan Bank. All of a sudden I started getting calls from Chase Manhattan Bank. They claimed I owed them money. I told them I never opened a Chase Manhattan Bank account. They called and called. They would call starting from 6 AM to about 9 PM Monday through Saturday every hour on the hour! The calls were half human and half computer generated calls. The human ones never gave me any straight answers. I asked them to send us some sort of bill to show how they came up with the idea we owed them money. I said, "You can't just harass people out of their hard earned money. You have to have some sort of paper trail to show it!" I had three elderly family members that had just passed away. When I asked the callers if their calls were possibly in regards to the estates of these close family relatives, they sometimes answered yes! Very confusing. I got some information on how to deal with this problem. I finally got an address and wrote to ask for "Validation". Their response was to say we owed them over $100,000.00! Yes, you've read correctly. I said $100,000.00! Now I know anyone with horse sense would know when they owed anyone $100,000.00. I said I must have had an out of body experience or maybe amnesia because this would be the only way I would have acquired a $100,000.00 debt! I informed by someone from Chase Manhattan Bank that they were retaliating against me because of the amount I owed. I did not become aware until about a year ago how they arrived at this $100,000.00 figure. It was because they somehow got hold of my personal information (now remember I said this was an individual account not a joint account) and they reported against my credit history not one or two but nine different accounts all totaling the near $100,000.00 figure! I also finally discovered how they merged with Providian. Providian admitted to me that they were in a slump and were selling off accounts to make a profit. But I explained my account had been over paid and that there was no money due to them. What a mess! In the meantime, Chase Manhattan Bank refused to accept they made a mistake! It didn't matter how much proof I sent them. They told me they never make mistakes and they were going to get this money out of me one way or another! I can't tell you how much stress and agony this caused me and my family. Chase Manhattan also hired a company called GCFS, Inc to do some dirty work. They hounded me for two years. They also ignored my letters and proof that I did not owe the money. They ignored the requests for Validation. They filed a lawsuit and filed it in a way that by passes any type of hearing or needing to show proof we owed this money. I hired an attorney that cost me $10,000.00. They initially tried to settle with us for $12,000.00. Then after they were forced to show Validation, they realized they made a mistake! Then they offered us $1,000.00 for our troubles! When we got angry about that they offered $2,000.00 because they said this was all the government would force them to pay as penalties. We urged the attorneys we hired to hurry up and file a cross complaint. They said they wanted to address the issues that GCFS, Inc started. They wanted to see if they had any Validation. I said "Of course they have NO Validation! We gave you enough proof to show that for heavens sake!" Then all of a sudden GCFS, Inc dropped the case and when our attorneys went to file the cross complaint we kept urging them to do and had paid them to do, they said the judge said, "Why bother? It's a moot point now!". Now they will not assist us. I have not been able to get them to remove the damage that they have caused us. We tried to get a loan on our homes and were refused and have had to pay outrageous interest rates as a result. I also tried to get a loan to start a jewelry business and was turned down. These people called family members that I didn't have the telephone numbers for and threatened them. They called my husband's coworkers and employer and said inflammatory statements. They even called neighbors from our old address that we haven't lived at for over 5 years to threaten them. And, they called our tenants renting our property to threaten them. This was all done as a way to extort money that we did not owe. I guess they felt they had done all else and now it was time to embarrass us out of money we didn't owe. They even went as far as to take us to court without proof and try to over-ride the system to extort money from us. This was a systematic abuse of power and in our eyes a form of racketeering. We thought we were the only ones who suffered this sort of nonsense but there was an article in a large local newspaper where the same things were done to another individual by the same company just like they did to us. Sorry but I can't believe this sort of rubbish goes on in America today. If, there is anyone out there willing to help us reverse the terrible injustice we would be ever so grateful! Thank you for listening. SRB
Susan
Foster City, California
U.S.A.
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