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I recently endured a Kafka-esque nightmare with my bank. I had this personal VISA card for several years but I rarely used it because I also have a Mastercard

I recently endured a Kafka-esque nightmare with my bank. I had this personal VISA card for several years but I rarely used it because I also have a Mastercard that I prefer. Anyway, two years ago when I started my current venture I opened a business bank account with my preferred bank for business banking (same bank I had the personal VISA through), so I applied for a business VISA. At the same time, I told them I wanted to cancel my personal VISA, because I don't need three credit cards. No problem, did the paperwork and left the card at the bank. A couple of weeks ago, I received this stern letter informing me that I'm "not acting in accordance with my cardholder agreement / unpaid bills / unfulfilled obligations / we've cancelled your account / etc." It lists a card number I don't recognize. I call them right away. Turns out it was the personal VISA I cancelled two years ago. Around six months ago, a transaction went through on the account. Then I didn't pay off the transaction. Of course I didn't: I received no notice, no mail, no phone call, nothing. Why would I, for a card that at that point had been cancelled for 1.5 years? So after months of "defaulting" they freaked out, "cancelled" the card, put a black mark on my credit rating, and sent me that letter. Meanwhile I have been doing business with the bank, and with my business VISA (same exact companies!) the whole time. Trying to rectify this issue was a bureaucratic nightmare, where I got shuttled from my bank branch over to VISA and back again. It featured enjoyable conversations that started with things like, "for identity verification purposes, please give me the three digits on the back of your card" (hadn't had it in two years!) and ended with "I'm afraid we can't verify your identity". What was especially frustrating was I managed to find the paperwork for the card cancellation. I have a signed and dated document that says right on it, "Card destroyed in branch". After seven or eight interactions with VISA and my bank, I finally managed to get them to resolve the issue. But this all could have been avoided had they simply called me or mailed me a letter. Instead, they claimed that they'd sent statements to the "online portal" which, of course, I did not have access to, since I'd closed the account!

jeromegv 5y ago
Same thing happened with me and MBNA, they just never sent me physical bill OR an email for a transaction I had no idea occurred (because I had canceled the card!) and then put a mark on my credit report because I had a debt that was not resolved. All of this for... $7
saganus 5y ago
What happened to you is clearly not your fault, but after having similar issues with big institutions, I've realized that doing more than one "important" operation on a " big business/bank" account is always finicky. So now I do things one at a time. E.g. To cancel a card, first move all money (or debts) from acct A to acct B. Go home. Couple of days later, pay any outstanding fees of acct A. Go home. Couple of days later, request cancellation. Inevitably find that something else needs to be done, so do that thing. Go home. Couple of days later.... You get the idea. It sucks big time, but I've found it's better that way, since the probability of error is somewhat lower (and even then it happens!)
- cipheredStones 5y ago
  It's sort of funny that software engineers spend so much time thinking about the nuances of making sure that things occur in the right order on the scale of milliseconds while maintaining invariants in all sorts of exotic distributed NoSQL systems that don't guarantee strong consistency... and meanwhile many of the most important things we do on computers use standard centralized relational DBs but take several business days to process and get screwed up if you don't wait long enough for them to resolve properly.
- xtiansimon 5y ago
  I’m starting to adopt a similar idea about non-urgent healthcare. I have found healthcare providers can not communicate costs when they have more than one procedure.
reincarnate0x14 5y ago
I had a couple of minor bills like this with companies I barely ever deal with, and at one point I bothered to look at my credit rating. The material impact of a few unpaid items was to drop the bullshit FICO rating from 840 to 810. As in not worth my time at all to fix some company's internal fuckups versus wait a few years for nobody else to care either.
chupasaurus 5y ago
> since I'd closed the account! Either you didn't or the bank who emitted the card might have a huge PITA due to passing the transaction to a bank account which should not be.
ben_w 5y ago
I had a similar thing a few years ago only with the police and a speeding ticket. Before me, the car was owned by my then-partner, who had just moved from the UK to California. I was to sell the car on her behalf, and the registered owner being in a different country is a really suspicious warning sign so we changed the ownership to me so I could sell it more easily. A week later, I did sell it, and did all the relevant change-of-ownership paperwork again. Six months later, the police sent me — not my partner, not the new owner — a speeding ticket. It took more than one go for me to prove I didn’t own the car.
fortran77 5y ago
It's a shame you can't get criminal charges against banks in cases like this. For people who aren't scrupulous about saving copies of transaction receipts, and memorializing transactions, you can be in real trouble for a long time!
- olliej 5y ago
  Right? They can do incredible damage to people, but have no consequences for it - take OP: if they were applying for a mortgage at the same time that black mark on their credit rating wouldn’t have caused the mortgage to fall through.
yummypaint 5y ago
Which bank?
- simonblack 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYQaYJxCltY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYQaYJxCltY

jeromegv 5y ago

Same thing happened with me and MBNA, they just never sent me physical bill OR an email for a transaction I had no idea occurred (because I had canceled the card!) and then put a mark on my credit report because I had a debt that was not resolved. All of this for... $7

saganus 5y ago

What happened to you is clearly not your fault, but after having similar issues with big institutions, I've realized that doing more than one "important" operation on a " big business/bank" account is always finicky. So now I do things one at a time. E.g. To cancel a card, first move all money (or debts) from acct A to acct B. Go home. Couple of days later, pay any outstanding fees of acct A. Go home. Couple of days later, request cancellation. Inevitably find that something else needs to be done, so do that thing. Go home. Couple of days later.... You get the idea. It sucks big time, but I've found it's better that way, since the probability of error is somewhat lower (and even then it happens!)

cipheredStones 5y ago
It's sort of funny that software engineers spend so much time thinking about the nuances of making sure that things occur in the right order on the scale of milliseconds while maintaining invariants in all sorts of exotic distributed NoSQL systems that don't guarantee strong consistency... and meanwhile many of the most important things we do on computers use standard centralized relational DBs but take several business days to process and get screwed up if you don't wait long enough for them to resolve properly.
xtiansimon 5y ago
I’m starting to adopt a similar idea about non-urgent healthcare. I have found healthcare providers can not communicate costs when they have more than one procedure.

reincarnate0x14 5y ago

I had a couple of minor bills like this with companies I barely ever deal with, and at one point I bothered to look at my credit rating. The material impact of a few unpaid items was to drop the bullshit FICO rating from 840 to 810. As in not worth my time at all to fix some company's internal fuckups versus wait a few years for nobody else to care either.

chupasaurus 5y ago

> since I'd closed the account! Either you didn't or the bank who emitted the card might have a huge PITA due to passing the transaction to a bank account which should not be.

ben_w 5y ago

I had a similar thing a few years ago only with the police and a speeding ticket. Before me, the car was owned by my then-partner, who had just moved from the UK to California. I was to sell the car on her behalf, and the registered owner being in a different country is a really suspicious warning sign so we changed the ownership to me so I could sell it more easily. A week later, I did sell it, and did all the relevant change-of-ownership paperwork again. Six months later, the police sent me — not my partner, not the new owner — a speeding ticket. It took more than one go for me to prove I didn’t own the car.

fortran77 5y ago

It's a shame you can't get criminal charges against banks in cases like this. For people who aren't scrupulous about saving copies of transaction receipts, and memorializing transactions, you can be in real trouble for a long time!

olliej 5y ago
Right? They can do incredible damage to people, but have no consequences for it - take OP: if they were applying for a mortgage at the same time that black mark on their credit rating wouldn’t have caused the mortgage to fall through.

yummypaint 5y ago

Which bank?

simonblack 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYQaYJxCltY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYQaYJxCltY