If you have had bad dealings with FCNB and payment processing, please, please, please read this.
After hours and hours of being routed to different departments and collection agencies yesterday, I finally got a "Card Processing" employee out of the Pittsburgh recovery department to blow the whistle on FCNB and their dirty practices. After the last recovery rep had the gaul to disrespect me by calling me a Bi& for simply asking for his name, I decided that enough was enough and too much was foolish. I've had it with FCNB and will do whatever it takes to get a class action suit filed—particularly now that there is an employee that can be subpeonaed.
For those of you who are wondering what went wrong with FCNB after doing years of good business with the company, here's the scoop:
FCNB starts realizing that they are in financial trouble. They close out all of their card holder accounts and virtually disappear. Customers stopped receiving statements, the call centers stopped taking calls or routed them to bogus phone numbers and departments. I'm sure you all got the same old story as I did about there not being any supervisors or managers. After these accounts started accumulating late fees, they sold them off to a various collection agencies. The trick for FCNB is to get the account balances really hight so they can sell them off for more then they're actually worth. For instance, my account only had a balance of $266 dollars in March. A collection agency usually only pays a fraction of what the account balance actually is to the orignial lender. Lets make things simple and say that the collection agency in my case only offered 50% of my account balance, which would be $133 to take over my debt. Well, by the time FCNB stonewalls me and gauges late fees and over the limit fees, my account balance is now at $760.in this case, the collection agency will give FCNB $380 which is much more than I owed to begin with.
Are you starting to get the picture? Now the new collection agency that has assumed all of this debt, that was submitted fraudulently in my opinion, is stuck with a gang of unhappy campers who paid on time and literally were forced into not paying. Now what is the new collection agency going to do? In my case, they turned around and sold the debt to someone else. Now there is a third company involved to complicate matters even more.in the process, FCNB files bankruptcy so that the new collection agencies that they sold out to, can't come back and get them to assume liability for how they handled their customers.
I'm no attorney, but common sense tells me that the law has definitely been broken at the consumer's expense somewhere in this never-ending saga.
I can't tell you how many phone calls I made to attempt making payments and request a statement. I had returned merchandise shortly after receiving my last statement in May and wanted to see if my credit appeared. To this day, I still don't know if it was applied or not. I got divorced last May. It was imperative that I get factual information regarding all of my accounts in order to settle my divorce properly. I went into Eddie Bauer stores and tried to get information and make payments. Eddie Bauer would not take payments and said that they were no longer affiliated with FCNB, Newport News or Spiegel.
There are more details to my story that are very similar to all the other messages that I have read on this site and others. Bottom line—we need an attorney, and fast. I could not figure out how to reply to messages on this website. Maybe there is no functionality to do this on this site. We definitely need a way to organize and communicate with each other.
Shawn
Fishers, Indiana
U.S.A.
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