My story is uncannily similar to one posted on march 1 by stacey in clementon, NJ. I've held a providian credit card for 10 years. I made ontime payments for 10 years. I once bottomed out the balance to several thousand dollars and paid it back to zero. I got the balance high again recently. Providian was in the interim apparently bought out by Washington Mutual. Beginning this year I noticed my APR had gone from 21.99% to 31.99%. I called and I was told that I had received a notice in october to either accept the APR hike or close out the account. That's cool, I would have closed out the account, only I didn't see any notice of the option. I called again and said "ok I guess I missed it or didn't get it, let me exercise the option to close out at 21.99% now". Wamu's answer was basically "too bad". This is criminal. How abusive of your customers can you get? I've noticed I'm not alone—I've seen many public online complaints about this regarding Washington Mutual specifically. A banker friend of mine said off the top of his head that he thinks the company is cash starved because of their role in the home mortgage crisis, so they're putting the squeeze on their card holders. What gets me here is not only the crazy interest rate, but also this option paper that's probably just a little fine print form and the fact that Wamu just says "too bad" if you missed it.
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