Enraged, Diabolical Banks Readying a Savage Bloody Ass-Raping for Consumers; Escape Now To A Credit Union or Thrift!

In that odd vein, I received a spam that says:

*Email*
WORLD BANK GROUP
>From Desk of the President
World Bank Group,
Switzerland.
:…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………….
Subject: PAYMENT APPROVAL FROM WORLD BANK SWITZERLAND.
I am Mr.PAUL.WOLFOWITZ , the President World Bank Group.
Therefore, you are legally and highly notified with every absolute authorization on your funds and transaction long awaited release set up to fight against scams and frauds activities ravenging World Wide.
In a nut shell, the concerned are as follow, unpaid Contract payment, Funds Inheritance or Lottery Winning due to unauthorized/incapability of financial Institutions/security companies In releasing such huge sum of money due to Fraud, terrorist and money Laundry activities going on world wide.
This financial institute known as World Bank Group has Mandated the Chattered Bank via the desk of PROF.ASHOK SODJE funds remittance departmental head to release the long awaited funds of $3,000.000,00 (3Million United States Dollars) with interest accrue to beneficiaries through direct TELEGRAPHIC WIRE TRANSFER

@ManchuCandidate: That’s odd. I got the same email, but it said I needed to launder Goldman Sachs bonuses.

Pay off the damned card every month.

@Dodgerblue: Oh, like that helps.

@Dodgerblue: The industry term for a consumer who practices this kind of discipline is ‘deadbeat’. I am not making this up. Likely, the bank will either hit you with a annual minimum fee or just cancel your card altogether, if it is in any way legal, and send you soliciations for an annual fee card. If not, they’ll cancel your card anyway and sell the list of canceled deadbeat cardholders to other banks at a premium so 1) other banks can avoid them or 2) they can try to sell you on an annual-fee card now that you are on the pariah’s list.

@nojo: It’s the slippery slope argument. Once you fall behind, you’re screwed. So I should have said: never fall behind. If you ain’t got the $$ in your checking account to cover the purchase, don’t buy it.

@FlyingChainSaw: I’ve called a couple of times to cancel annual-fee cards and allowed myself to be talked out of it when the nice person on the phone offered to waive the fee. I have one annual-fee card from a major airline that has more than paid for itself in “free” flights that I’ve taken.

@Dodgerblue: So I should have said: never fall behind.

Well, that’s the scam: Customers made a reasonable calculation of monthly payments based on low-interest offers, and treated them as bank loans. They budgeted accordingly, and paid on time.

Which really screwed the banks that made the offers.

So the banks did the only rational thing: Raise the monthly minimum payment from 2 percent to 5 percent. Turns out that little detail wasn’t in the fine print.

In other words: Customers didn’t fall behind until the banks changed the terms.

@Dodgerblue: Yes, it depends on the card and/or the bank. I lay out, I think, $300 a year for an Amex but the cashback covers it and I’d pay it anyway as I’ve needed them a few times when I’ve traveled overseas and they answered the phone in a couple of rings and did the right thing by me. I don’t mind the fee for service but this hurl-the-customer over the bumper, knock-’em-conscious and assfuck them to death approach that’s become industry practice since Citi got the usury ruling is another thing all together.

@nojo: the terms and the payment logistics, often shifting due by dates and changing grace periods specifically to game the customer into some kind of missed-payment/rate-rise, late-fee scenario, etc. If it was legal for bank personnel to show up at your house and pull out your kidneys with an ice pick and sell them to debauched oligarchs for cannibal feasts, half of America would be on dialysis, paying for the treatments on ‘low-interest’ medical lines of credit from the same fucking banks.

@FlyingChainSaw: That’s why I never read those “change of terms” things they send me. I just assume they are thinking up new ways to fuck me over.

And don’t get me started about how few transactions the usury laws actually apply to. When I was a Legal Services lawyer, my clients used to come in with auto sales contracts with APRs that were through the roof. Mostly, that didn’t mean shit to them: the helpful salespeople had sold them on the monthly payment and the dealer usually carried the paper anyway so that the Circle of Repossession (cue music) could continue.

@FlyingChainSaw: Thank you for this PSA. I was happy to see that the FCU I’ve belonged to since I was a little girl is five stars, and “much better” than all others when I ran it through.

OTOH, I am like Dodger. I do love my evil Citibank credit card, b/c I pay it off in full every month and earn a shitload of miles for my American Airlines FF account, which has paid for tickets to places like Australia, Argentina, Hawaii, and countless lower-48 tickets. Maybe I should suck it up and go to AmEx. For some reason they seem less evil, but it might be simply their commercials make me think that.

@SanFranLefty: I love my AmEx–it’s the only card I pay for, and I get Delta FF miles that helped pay for our trip to Hawaii. They’re also invaluable if you’re in a foreign country and you lose your card or have another disaster. Mr Cyn lost his BofA debit card in HI, and had a hell of a time getting thru to a human and cancelling it.

@SanFranLefty: If you can manage with Citi with no fee, great, use them, abuse them., and when the bank fails do feel righteous about sucking down a six of Ballantine and head over to piss on some faces. Meantime, know that a good deal on Amex requires you to spend money and move a lot of transactions through it to break even. Some of my appointments satisfy that requirement easily and I appreciate the fact that they do a good job with security-related aspects of managing my account and that their agents are not brain-damaged fucktards living in a mud hut with a VoIP connection who are taught to repeat ‘so sorry’ over and over again, disregard all your questions and concerns and attempt to sell you high-interest ‘products’ the way all banks’ reps are these days. I dunno if they’re more or less evil than Citi but they run the business like a business instead of a complete and uter racket like most American banks these days. I’d say keep the Citi card but keep a ‘spack of Ballantine handy.

Bingo. Or just have something you need taking care of on your behalf while you’re rolling. As far as I can tell, their agents are trained and ready to perform most any task that Amex has on its menu. I’ve never been transferred. My sense is that they hold costs down by reducing churn of employees and making that customer service corps highly efficient – mostly by being able to close trouble tickets without having to socialize them among a larger employee pool. Customer service is very hard to do well consistently and really takes an enduring executive commitment, the kind of commitment that separates say Apple from snarling shithouses like Dell.

@Mistress Cynica: They’re also invaluable if you’re in a foreign country and you lose your card or have another disaster.

Catch me when I have more time, I deal with this shit, I work inside this shit, its all over, not just banks, shit.

@Promnight: I can imagine. Had one guy show me a business plan for a used car franchise – based completely on financial pornography. They bought the usual crapmobiles in bulk at auction and sold them for variable mark-ups based on some calculation of down payment and income. The big win in the scheme was that the car would actually be paid for or mostly paid for – in terms of acquisition cost to the company at the auction – and the payments were most all gravy sopped off of the backs of people with no access to a job hat would pay them enough to save or to real credit markets. I nearly threw up. This is third world shit, forth world shit.

@FlyingChainSaw: Wait, there’s a fourth world now? When did that happen?

@FlyingChainSaw: This is exactly the business model that my Legal Services clients would get ensnared in. The only way we could get leverage was to go after the banks that were financing what we would now call a RICO scheme.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Geopolitical string theory. Dimensions keep multiplying all over the place.

@FlyingChainSaw: I saw that shit every day of the week when I was a legal aid dude on the Navajo Nation. It’s called” repo the clunker”. Fortunately, the Navajo Nation as a sovereign entity, has outlawed repossession on tha rez as a big F.U. to bordertown used car dealers. Same with wage garnishments assept for child support.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Tha Hopis say this is the fourth world, which is soon to be destroyed and then there will be a fifth world.

i can’t wait til rat get’s up to show him this. we have only 2 cards. an amex, of course, and one from our local off shore laundering bank.
he’s the sort who pays the entire balance every month. i kept telling him he’s a loser in their eyes. so we did a little experiment. we asked for a credit increase on the local bank card. they said no. then we spent a few months making minimum payments. back to the bank for an increase…ding ding ding!!! they doubled it. AND gave me a car loan. which is big, because my identity was stolen a few years ago and i’m still dealing with that aftermath and re-establishing my good credit. we are looking for a lot to build a house on, now that we have the credit power. all because we’re not paying in full monthly. what. a. racket.

@baked: Build on a hill, and/or over a carport so the next hurricane/flood takes away unimportant shit. Oh and BTW, I’m looking for tips on surviving monsoon season(s). Anyone?

@Dodgerblue:

Paying in full every month is my philosophy, too, and I was cc debt free until September when my sweet, extra-precious, best fur-baby evah, Charlie, had to have his ACL replaced. Declining the surgery would’ve meant the end for him.

I believe my exact words when I saw the grand total on the dawggy orthopedic surgeon’s bill were “Is this your phone number?”

And then:

“Holy mother!D@#$%$%^^&%$#sonofa$^&&&*(*&^%&!”

Fall-back plan: pay it off over 12-24 months (hopefully).

Reminds me of Sicko when Moore chatted up that nice British fellow who calmly explained that the modern United States’ primary means of social control are to frighten and demoralize the population, then overwhelm us with low wages, catastrophic debt and high living expenses to keep us in line.

@Original Andrew: I had to get a line of credit loan from my credit union to pay for my pupster’s multiple surgeries at the end of her life. Put them on the credit card to at least get the miles, then had to get the loan to pay off the CC. Since the interest rate on the loan was 15% less than the CC rate, seemed like the best option.

@Dodgerblue: Right, the commercial lenders won’t get into this kind of business or payday loans on their own – but they’re more than thrilled to act as wholesale lenders to any sleaze bag operation that preys on the poor. At least Ford put its own name on its scummy fucking mortgage business, at least until it stunk so bad they had to jettison or rename it. Or was that GM? In any case, if they really cared about innovation, they’d set up a crystal meth lab.

@redmanlaw: Wow, you think a city could establish the same exclusion to keep the sharks away? Did you pull together the legislation to repel the slimes?

I also like AmEx because they’ve been upfront and honest. Yes, they charge a lot, but you get a lot, too. Plus, their fee isn’t hidden in some murky fine print, it’s very clear what you will pay. I’m OK with paying for something if I actually GET something in return.