Just letting folks know about Clearwire's ridiculous credit card pre-authorization policy for existing customers. If you go to your account on Clearwire's site and want to change your automatic billing to a new credit card, for example if you change bank accounts or get a new card, Clearwire will only update the information if you let them charge a whopping $45.00 pre-authorization amount to "validate" the card.
Yes, you read that right. $45.00. For the privilege of paying your bill Sure, you get it back eventually. It's only a pre-authorization and allegedly will be returned to you in 3-5 business days. So essentially you're floating them a loan for a week, taking their word that it will be returned, and all so you can keep THEIR billing system up to date.
Is Clearwire using this to may payroll? Are things that bad for them that they need to dip into customers' bank accounts for short-term loans? Who in their right mind would agree to have $45 tied up by their ISP for absolutely no good reason?
I called Clearwire's customer service department to ask about my options, and found out that they could update my account info over the phone for a greatly reduced pre-authorization of only $1, which is much more in line with other companies that want to make sure your card is valid but is puzzlingly different to the $45 requested online. Unfortunately by then they'd already pissed me off, and suspicious of the vast difference between the amounts, I wasn't interested in letting them "pre-authorize" one red dime of my money, particularly since they had already verified my identity during the regular Clearwire "who are we talking to" crapola, and my credit card details matched those on the Clearwire account in every way.
Call me crazy, but it seems that the act of paying my bill with the card in question would give them all the info the needed about whether the card was valid ("hey, whaddaya know - the card worked!") and their usual ID validation bumf was enough to convince them that I was both the me on the Clearwire account AND the me on the credit card, not coincidentally with the same name and address on each. So why the need to float Clearwire a little extra spending money, whether $1 or $45 or some other random amount?
Should you find yourself in this same ridiculous policy trap, be aware that any card can be processed as a one-off payment without any pre-authorization. So you can just wait until you get the account reminder one day past due, then call in with your payment, and voila! Of course this ultimately costs Clearwire more money since they have to pay staff to process payments manually rather than having it automatically charged to your account details on file, but that's the law of unintended consequences for you. Expect to see a fee tacked on this any day now - a "processing fee" if your on-file payment method can't be charged, or a fee for paying over the phone. Maybe our contract will expire before they get around to this one and we can get out...
Sorry for such a long rant over what is ultimately a pretty trivial matter, but it just gives me the shits when vendors treat their customers so poorly and with no logic behind their actions. And they wonder why people leave in droves...
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