I have had an account with Best Buy for quite a while and have been a good customer who pays my bill on time. This being said, I purchased a MAC and Playstation among a few other things back in July. I purchased this with my Best Buy account because you had a promotion at that time where no interest would be charged for 18 months. I needed to pay off my account by January 29 so as not to be charged the deferred interest charges of nearly $800.00.
As of my January statement I owed $1612.15 for the promotional payoff amount. So on January 11 I paid $1000.00 and then the remaining $612.15 on January 25. Then on January 26 I received my February statement showing that I owed $636.03 for the promotional payoff amount. Because I had paid the $612.15 already, I went online to pay the remaining $23.88, of which I paid $24.00. Confident in the fact that you have been such a great company to buy from and work with, and with no issues ever before with the financial institution, HSBC, that you use; I was shocked when my March statement stated that I was charged $784.09 in deferred interest!!!
I was irate at these charges! So I let a few days pass until I called Best Buy customer service on March 8th. I first spoke with Jasfar, of whom I relayed my plight. He said he was sorry but unable to help me and referred me to an account manager named Soli.
Upon speaking with Soli, I once again relayed my story. She said that I was charged the interest because I had not read the wording in the box labeled Promotion Expiration Alert! Underneath the payoff amount numbers, which says To avoid paying Deferred Interest charges, pay your promotional payoff amount of $636.03 by January 29,
2012.in addition, minimum payments due must be paid by the Payment Due Date. I told her I had read that, yet took that as, I am paying more than the $29.00 minimum payment, I was paying off my promotional balance. She then said that I had needed to pay the $636.03 plus the $29.00 minimum payment. I then said that that was not clear to
me as a customer, and that I think that it should be worded different so as to let customers know that they must pay both. I then asked her about the $40.00 mininum payment due from December, and how I had paid $1000.00 toward it. I
asked her how that worked and how the money was allotted for that; seeing as the next statement reflected the $1000.00 payment being put towards my promotional payoff amount.
I then asked her if she could please help me out by reversing the interest charges. Soli then told me that because the interest was already added onto my account, she was unable to remove all of the interest charges, yet could remove 30% of the charges, if I could pay the $29.00 minimum payment from February, as well as the $39.00 minimum payment from March, in the next two to three business days. I told her that I would and did so March 10, making a
payment of $70.00 on bestbuy.com.
I am perplexed that Soli could only remove 30% because she said that the interest was already added onto my account. Yet if she could remove 30%, why couldnt she remove the entire amount? I am trying to be a good, upstanding customer. I needed to pay off that promotional payoff because I do not have an extra $800.00. And if I had known that I needed to pay the additional $29.00, then I would have just paid it! But I didnt know that because that wording was not clear to me. I think that it is crazy to charge someone $784.09 in interest charges because of odd wording! It seems to me that this was just a ploy for me to get charged the interest.
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