What a Horror Story.
On a sunny day in early August, just as I am beginning to get psyched up for my last year at NYU. I get a letter in the mail1311 from HESC, which is the company that helps students get their money/ loans for school. The first thing that catches my eyes are the big bold letters in the middle of the page that read
“DENIED – THE BORROWER IS 90 DAYS DELINQUENT ON THE PAYMENT OF A DEBT”
this means that JP Morgan Chase which is the bank I applied with, will not give me a loan because the big bold line above appeared in my credit record. The letter contained the name of the Credit Reporting Company which the information was acquired from. Equifax as it turns out, has a really good online system to see the status of your credit. With-in a minute I realized that the negative credit came from my Capital One Credit Card. Soon after looking at my credit report on Equifax’s web site I called capital one to check on my account. Low and Behold, my account was cancelled!
My first goal when talking to Customer Service was getting an explanation to the reason why my account was cancelled. Talking to the Capital One Financial Corporation customer service was like pulling teeth. The first person I talked to had a really thick indian accent and I could barely understand anything he was saying. And I have a feeling that the person in the phone did not have the slightest idea of what I was trying to convey. Surprisingly the call was dropped and had to call again. The second time I called, after 5 min trying to navigate the touch-tone options I finally got an other customer service person. This time, as soon as they saw that my account was closed they transfered me to some specialist to open an other account, but that’s not what I wanted! All I wanted was an explanation to why my account had been cancelled. I was really frustrated and running low on patience, so I waited till the next day to call again.
The third call was a little bit more informative. As it turns out, back in February, I had payed my account in full so that I had a $0 valance left. The somewhere along the line After paying my valance in full, Capital One decided to charge me a $17 dollar interest fee which I never knew about because I stop getting invoices for some strange reason. Here I thought I was not getting invoices because I had a zero balance which I thought was a nice way to save trees; if there is no valance in an account, why send a bill. As it turns out, that was not true and 6 months later I have a really shitty credit score/ credit history, a cancelled credit card and no loans for Graduate School. All because of Capital One’s awful customer service. I have other credit cards and if I happen to forget to pay on time, they give me a curtsey call and remind me that my payment is due; Which is awesome!
Capital One Never called me, never sent a notice to let me know that my account was in trouble, did not have a collections agency try to contact me or make any sort of attempt to let me know that I owed them $17 Dollars. I would have payed that off in a second had I known, its only $17 bucks!
Apparently Capital One does not value their members/ card holders. It seems that they don’t give a rat’s ass if they ruin a person’s credit record for a measly couple of Dollars. This lack of value for their card holders has put Capital One in my Sh*t list. And I encourage you to get a new credit card if you have a Capital One Card.