Complaint / Review
Bank of America
Interest rate increase

I am writing to complain about the practices of Bank of America. My husband had a stroke almost 4 years ago and during his recovery we accumulated some credit card debt. We were approached by Bank of America with the offer of a balance transfer for lower interest rate which we took. We both have good jobs and have not missed any payments. This July we did not received a bill and posted a late payments as soon as we realized we had missed the due date. Although we understand that we are ultimately responsible, we expected to pay a late fee and move on. Bank of America, however, had different intentions. They raised our rate from 8.9% to 29.9% and last month we paid over $400.00 in interest fees alone. We received a letter from Bank of America letting us know that they would be offering us 3 options:

1- Work with us to reduce our payment

2- Expand time of repayment

3- Debt consolidation

When we called them, they refused to lower our rate, and told us that the only option available was debt consolidation through their trusted debt consolidation agency. This would entail to close all our credit accounts, transfer our debt to their preferred debt consolidator and not be allowed to use any other credit.

In addition, Bank of America has reported us to Equifax – making it impossible for us to transfer our debt to another account.

Had we stayed at 8.9%, we would have continued to pay our account without any problems, however, Bank of America has put our family in a situation of great hardship. So far we are paying their required high interest monthly payment and yet they still won’t consider anything else. We refuse the debt consolidation because we consider transferring our debt to a company we no longer trust absurd - Bank of America is behaving like a loan shark and seeking monopoly over our situation. We have other credit cards and do not have any problems with them.

This happened a week before the new law was passed to protect consumers against such predatory behavior.interesting enough, second time we called they had changed their greeting to: “If you did not received a bill, you still responsible for paying it on time”- by that I assume that we are not the only ones that did not receive a bill in the month of July. I truly believe we fell victims of a scam.