In December, my husband and I were in the process of refinancing our home and I went online to get our credit reports prior to initiating the re-fi with our mortgage company. My husband had been in a car accident in November in his company vehicle and the his company had dropped the ball on submitting all the medical bills from the emergency room to their insurance company for payment. So, of course, because my husband was the patient, we began getting notices from collection agencies regarding the non payment of these bills. I had submitted the bills from the hospital to his company immediately upon receipt of them and when they were notified that the bills had not been paid and sent copies of the collection notices they informed us that they had "lost" the copies of the original bills we had sent to them. Long story short, I ended up having to track down copies of all the original bills from all the different departments that hospitals bill you for these days and payment was finally rendered over 2 years later. Our mortgage lender (Suntrust) is wonderful to deal with and because I had pulled the reports and had proper documentation to prove we were not liable for these debts we were not forced to pay them at the time of closing even though they were still on my husbands credit report. I used Privacy Matters for the 3 in 1 credit report online and it was supposed to be a one time only fee. Imagine my surprise when my credit card started being billed monthly as follows:
PrivacyMatter $29.95
PMIdentity $29.95
PMIdentity $1.00
YourSavingsCl $1.00
They are all apparently the same company and with the holidays and having two family members dealing with terminal illnesses since January, I wasn't as vigilant as I usually am about checking my charges each month. My account is set up to pay the minimum balance automatically each month as a safety net, so I didn't worry about it with everything else that was going on.
I called today to cancel each one of these accounts, all have different phone numbers on my credit card statement as well as to have the last 2 charges of $29.95 that were billed to my account yesterday credited back. It was a 30 minute nightmare. I have no faith that they will indeed cancel these accounts, credit back the two charges or stop trying to charge my card in the future so I called my credit card company, explained the situation to them, cancelled the card and am having a new card with a new account number issued.
For other consumers who may not be aware, you MUST call the company or companies that are charging your card monthly and CANCEL the accounts, even if you didn't authorize them to charge you monthly. Then you must call your credit card company, explain the situation to them and tell them specifically the date that you cancelled your accounts with these companies. Even if you close the account and open a new one, as I did, if you don't inform the credit card company that you cancelled the account, they consider these types of charges "pre-authorized" and you will be responsible for payment of future charges even if they are still being charged to your closed account.
As a former Assistant Manager in the banking industry, NEVER, EVER use your Visa check card for ANY kind of monthly, pre-authorized billing and NEVER, EVER use it to purchase ANYTHING on the internet. Visa Check Cards are NOT covered by the same consumer protection laws as credit cards are. If you have fraudulent charges made to your Visa Check Card, you are NOT entitled to an immediate, provisional credit while the matter is investigated as you are with fraudulent credit card purchases.in order to get a provisional credit back to your checking account, you must appear at the bank in person and fill out an affadavit for EACH fraudulent charge. (I have had customers who in the course of a weekend have had up to 50 fraudulent charges and a seperate affadavit had to be filled out for EACH one) In most cases, you will also be required to file a police report and produce a copy of that for the bank. Only then will the bank issue a provisional credit pending investigation and until then, if your account is overdrawn, you are truly in a very difficult situation. I also highly recommend cancelling your Visa (or Mastercard) Check Card and opening a new one if you have had monthly pre-authorized billing (for things like gym fees etc. Etc.) and you have cancelled the account or changed your payment method and the charges are still billed to your Visa Check Card. You don't have to open a new checking account, just cancel the check card and have a new one issued. Banks cannot block pre-authorized charges on check cards, the only remedy is to cancel the card.
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