Our nightmare with Capital One starts just like everyone else's, my wife is a 10 plus years customer of Capital One and had one of those platinum miles card with a fixed rate. Back in July I was laid off from my job and when it became evident that finding a new job was going to take some time. We contacted Capital One to inform them of our financial situation and to see if we could work out a reduced monthly payment plan to help us over the rough part that we are going through right now.
The first CSR we spoke with said that they would have to freeze our account, but the CSR said that they would setup a 4 month plan with reduced monthly payments. The CSR also stated at the end of the four months they would re-examine our financial situation to see if our account would be unfrozen and that we would see the reduced payment rate on our next billing statement from them.
About 2 1/2 weeks later the next billing statement came and the amount stated to pay was not reduced, but severely increased to over $600.00. We contacted Capital One again and spoke with another CSR, she said that there was a mistake in the notes on our account and she would correct them, she also stated that the whole process of correcting our account would go through faster if we made a over the phone payment of $235.00 today and our next billing statement would show the correct bill payment owed.
When September's billing statement came in the mail it show that we were 60 days behind and now owed $29.00 late payment fee, $39.00 over limit fee, $39.00 account processing fee, charge of $45.00 membership fee, and the unpaid amount of $365.00 from last month bill plus this months amount of $600.00 for a grand total of $1117.00 due immediately. Wait a minute, a $39.00 over limit fee, we had only used approximately half of our credit limit on the card. We called Capital One again and spoke with another CSR, he said that because we were 60 days behind on our payments and the account was frozen, our credit limit was reduced from $22K to $11,000.00.
The new amount that we owed on the card was $310.00 more then our new credit card limit was set at and we needed to pay the $1117.00 today over the phone to keep the account from being turned over to collections. I thought I was going to lose my mind right than, I asked to speak with a supervisor immediately because we were supposedly on a four month reduced payment plan arranged with a previous CSR.
After waiting approximately 30 minutes to speak with a supervisor, Sue came on the line and I explained the whole story to her from the beginning, she said that it would take her a few minutes to look at the account notes and she would put me on hold. Sue got back on the line and said that she didn't see any notes on this supposedly four month reduced payment plan, but did see in the notes that I had agreed to pay $235.00 a week for 4 weeks and she went on to say that they never do a payment reduction plan, it's not company policy to do so.
At that point, I also demanded an explanation to why our interest rate went from 9.99% to 28.71%, we have never had any delinquency on this account until 2 month ago, and our credit with other banks is fine. When I inquired as to why the APR was so drastically increased, the reason given to me was that Capitol One made a business decision, and that our only options were to accept the increase, or cancel the account. Of course, I said cancelled the account and setup a pay off plan.
Sue said that she was unable to do anything until the account was brought to current, I would have to pay the past due payments and an additional $312.00 to bring the account just under our new credit card limit. I told her that they cant make all sorts of changes to our account without first notifying us, Sue said that they can and they are not responsible for Post Office mail delivery problems.
I told Sue that we would be contacting our attorney due the amount of fraud being conducted here, she if we did so that our account would be turned over to collections and resolving any future customer problems would be out of their hands and up to collections to deal with any further customer problems. At that point, I slammed the phone down to hang up, after spending several minutes calming myself down, I reluctantly went to my wife and explained the whole conversation to her with Capital One.
Well, it only took a couple of weeks for Capital One passes off our debt to NCO Financial and the phone calls have started. The phone calls start at 8:01am and don't stop until 8:58pm at night, caller ID is wonderful for tracking their phone calls, and we have received as many as 15 in one day.
The phone calls have gotten so bad that they are now calling my wife's father and brother and leaving messages with them stating they need to get a hold of us immediately because it is an emergency and all that they will state is "business financial matter". We have spoken with NCO Financial on a couple of different occasions, and I was told that we have 8 days to come up with $3800.00 before they will talk about repayment terms with us.
I told them we don't have that much money laying around and I was told by the NCO Financial CSR that we have 2 cars and we should sell one of them, he further went on to say that my wife's father has a lot of money and that she should borrow the money from him. He also had the daring to say that if we didn't pay the $3800.00 within eight days, that the lawsuit against us would continue to go through and to sue for a judgment to have our assets seized so the debt would be settled.
I asked him just for the fun of it what was our outstanding balance on the account right now, he said to pay it off we would need $16983.71 today, the amount that we supposedly owed 45 days ago was around $11800.00.
It is very evident that Capital One has put a new business plan into action to help recover any losses the company may have seen do to home mortgage melt down by doing it on the backs of their customers. It seems very evident that the amount you owe on your account is solely dependent on the CSR you talk to that day, plus it's very obvious that the CSR's are trained to deceive the customer in hopes of getting as much money as possible out of the customer on that particular phone call.
As of the date of me writing this, our attorney has not been able to talk with anybody directly who is handling our account and all of his letters have gone unanswered. With companies like Capital One, if you make the mistake of signing up for one of their credit card offers because of their slick advertisement campaigns, most people don't realize it until it's too late that they have made a pact with the devil and Capital One owns their sole and it will cost that person dearly to buy it back.
Capital One Needs to be held accountable for the "terrorist tactics" that they use on people.
Kurt
Columbus, Ohio
U.S.A.
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