Bank of America:

1. I paid up and closed my credit card last December.

2. I started getting robocalls a few weeks ago, and yesterday an e-mail about "important information about your account".

3. i assumed at first this was all phishing, but then I got mail today about a change in my credit card agreement.

4. So i called them up, and they're claiming I owe money for the interest that hit two days after I closed the account and late fees on the interest even though I never received any statements! They say it's not their fault, they lost my address! (which begs the question about how I got the mail today!)

OK - I can understand that I might owe some interest that wasn't posted until after I thought I paid everything off, but late fees?

:wtf:

My favorite line: "The account is closed, but you still owe us $XXX."

There should be a site for consumer complaints. Download the form and fill it out. Forward any hard copies you have--last statement, canceled check, and whatever. Explain the situation on paper the way you have explained it here: interest posted after the account was closed, no statements, late fees piling up. Do not editorialize on what bastards BoA are, chances are the AG's office already knows.

You would be surprised what kind of pressure a state AG can exert with one nasty letter.

You might also want to forward copies to your congresscritters and beg for help. They love this shit in an election year.

In short, you don't owe this, but you already know that. There comes a time when we all dig our heels in and tell the PTB to go to hell. My time came over a padded hospital bill.

the AG doesn't mess around with this kind of stuff (or at least they didn't used to). I used to work for HSBC (it was Household Credit back then) from 1997-2000 and it was a big deal when a complaint was sent to the AG over one of us...

I had to file a complaint years ago with the FCC to get AT&T to stop billing me for NOT USING THEIR LONG DISTANCE SERVICE! The second the FCC contacted them about it, they said they made a mistake and backed out all the charges.

You also need to check your credit report to make sure they haven't got it all screwed up with their ridiculous, greedy, excessive charges.

He will take care of this.
Did I mention that I oppose all bailouts of financial institutions, regardless of size?

if by "i paid up and closed my credit card" you mean you paid off the balance that was showing at that moment, but you were still accruing interest charges that didn't hit your account until the end of the monthly cycle (after you closed your account) then yes, you owed the interest at that point.

and if you never paid the interest, then yes, they can hit you with late fees on the unpaid amount.

note that when you close a credit card account, that doesn't mean that they agree the balance is zero and no further charges will accrue. they're supposed to warn you to check your next statement and pay off any final interest charges and/or fees (and also to make sure to the card isn't being used for any automatic, recurring charges).

the only thing it looks like they screwed up on is that it sounds like that last statement never made it to you in the mail. you would have a hard time proving this, but if they're acknowledging that they "lost your address", then you should be able to convince them to let you just pay off the interest and they should waive the late fees.


incidently, as a practical matter, big banks maintain many different databases and as a result can have slightly different names and addresses for the same account. so the actual account database and the marketing database and the collections database might have different information. it shouldn't be that way, but in practice these things get out of sync all the time. that might explain how you never got statements but a collections notice found you.


in any event, good luck negotiating with them.

final interest owed, but not late fees on an account I thought was all cleared! I did all this 6 months ago, and really don't remember the sequence. I think the part about losing my address is rather unique. If the statements never got here, where did they go?

I hadn't used it for a year, then used it one month recently. I never got a statement from them and therefore it slipped my mind.

I got a call to let me know the payment was overdue and they confirmed they never sent a statement because "they don't send statements if the account has been inactive for more than 6 months". I asked them how they expected me to know to pay the bill if they deliberately don't send out statements. Answer: "uh".

Seems like they are trying new tactics to charge extra fees now that some regulation has been passed.