After a month of having an Old Navy credit card, issued by GE Money Bank, I closed the account due to the extremely poor service I received. My account was marked deliquent after having received not even a single statement. GE Money Bank had no concern for me, only their profit.
After sorting this all out, I am still left wondering how the application was ever approved without flagging it for fraud review. Their systems accepted the application with obviously inaccurate information. The address entered by the store associate did not match my credit file, nor did it even exist. My name was even entered incorrectly, with my first and last names reversed. This leaves my quite leary of the company's security practices.
In October of I visited the Old Navy store at the St. Matthews mall in Louisville, Kentucky. I opened a credit account in the process. The clerk did not ask for verification of my mailing address, blindly entering the address on my photo ID card. I had recently moved to the area and had not yet updated the address on my driver's license, so I inquired about correcting it. She seemed confused, so I finally left after confirming with her that she had entered the address as it appeared on my license. Later, I found that she had not entered it correctly.
I never received my card or a statement. A week or so later, as I was updating my checking account records, I noticed that the address listed on the Old Navy receipt for the purchase and credit application was wrong. Address line 1 was taken from my old address but my new ZIP code was used to populate the city and state. The invented address did not exist, so I would have never received mail at that address.
I promptly called GE Money Bank Old Navy customer service number to have my address of record corrected and inquire about my card. I intended to use it to view my account online. The representative updated my address and indicated that the card had not yet been sent out, despite the account being over a week old.
Upon correcting my address, I had still not received a single statement. It had been over a month, so I planned on calling customer service again to see what was up. Collections beat me to the change and called me around 3 in the afternoon on the 30th of November, to collect a payment. The agent was ever-so-eager to get a payment, paying little attention to the errors they had already committed that prevented my making a timely payment.
After arriving at the correct balance for the account, $73.94, I intended to pay the account in full. Only after providing payment information did the collections agent indicate there was a $15 charge to accept payment over the phone. I refused to pay the fee, given their inability to send me not one but two statements. He agreed to waive the fee, and the line disconnected.
I was logged in to my checking account online during the conversation, to verify the amount of the authorization. An authorization was made for $88.94, exactly $15 more than it should have been. I promptly called collections back to have the payment corrected. The second agent I spoke with seemed far more clueful, voided the previous payment and processed a second one in the correct amount. He also assured me that the late fee and interest charges were credited back to the account due to the errors.
Finally, I called customer service to verify that the fees were, in fact, credited, and to close my account. The customer service representative was the most polite and sincere representative I had spoken to all day. He even took time, before I had even requested it, to update my account history, to ensure nothing negative was reported to the credit bureau, after admitting and apologizing for their dropping the ball.
Aaron
Louisville, Kentucky
U.S.A.
0 comments