AmEx is awfully agressive.

[fireworks]

I'm sure I'm not the only one with an AmEx story, but it'll make for some entertainment, eh?

I have two credit cards with AmEx. Technically one is business and the other is personal, but both were used exclusively for business. I've had both of these accounts for several years now.

At some point I missed a payment on one account (out of stupidity or forgetfulness, not lack of money). They jacked up the interest rate on both. As time went on I got busier and busier, with less and less time to manage my finances and missed a few more here and there. Every time I missed one, the interest rate on both cards went up. For the last several months it's been at 29.99. Every time I call and ask to get the rate lowered they move the goalposts. "We need to see 6 months of on-time payments." "We need to see one year of on-time payments." "Your credit score is too bad." Several times I swear I set up a payment using their website, but for some reason they payments weren't taken, and of course I didn't keep or couldn't find the confirmation pages that I printed off. I called several times and asked about automatic payments - I have too many other things to worry about and couldn't count on myself to remember all of the payments that needed to be mailed. I set up automatic payments from my bank account which worked for a time, until I went over the limit on one of the cards and the automatic check from my bank didn't cover it then my interest rates went right back up.

At some point in late 2008 they closed my accounts. I got letters in the mail that basically said "we don't want your business, your credit is too bad." As pissed as I was about that there wasn't anything I could do - I certainly can't blame them for it. Given my payment history I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner. They did at least knock my interest rate down to something more reasonable - 14.99 or so. I logged in to their website, decided that my payment amount would be pretty stable from now on and set up an automatic payment for each card to be taken from my bank account.

Sometime in January, around the time I was starting to meet with lawyers about filing bankruptcy, I get a call from American Express that my card is past due. I don't understand how this can be, since I set up the automatic payment through their website. I call in and get a huge runaround. The first rep completely ignores what I'm saying that I had scheduled a payment on their website. All she wants to do is take a payment today. I ask for her supervisor, she puts me on hold, comes back and says her supervisor told her the same thing. This repeats a couple of times before I finally get a supervisor on the phone. All the while I'm clicking around the AmEx website when I find a printable PDF of my latest statement, which clearly says in big bold letters, "your automatic payment of $xx will be taken from your bank account on xx/xx." It took several layers of supervisors before I could find someone who would listen to me and understand that I had scheduled a payment, but for some reason the payment was not taken - and I don't watch my bank account closely enough to notice that they didn't take it when they were supposed to. Now they've charged me a late fee and bumped my interest rate BACK up to 29.99. Eventually, after spending almost an hour on the phone and talking to several reps in several departments, I finally get the late fee waived and the interest rate knocked back down where it was. I ask each person along the way, and I am assured each time, that the automatic payment that was scheduled about two weeks later would be taken on time, and that there would be no more negative consequences. I offer to make a payment right then and there if necessary and I'm told several times that it won't be needed, that the next payment would go automatically and everything was cool.

Fast forward a week or so - I'm getting calls, multiple times each day both at home and at work, from a very aggressive collector on this AmEx card. I explain to her the situation, she tells me that I can talk to AmEx all I want but they're just going to refer me back to her. I go to work and print off my first C&D letter to send on to her (via fax, at her request). The next day she calls again. She won't get off the phone, I'm trying very hard not to hang up on her even when she's being rude, she says she never received the C&D letter. When I finally get her to leave me alone I head to work and see that she's already left me a VM there. Hurrah. All of this for less than $2K.

Now I'm pissed. I've talked with two lawyers about filing bankruptcy and both advised that I stop paying cards, so I log in to the americanexpress.com site to cancel the automatic payments. The account that she'd been calling about still shows up on my list of accounts but all of my payment options are gone - I can't pay the bill, can't see my automatic payments. Out of spite I canceled the other one anyway.

Two days later the bill collector calls again to say that she's received a payment, but that it doesn't cover the entire balance. After listening to that VM I check my bank account and see that American Express DID take the automatic payment that they were supposed to take, even though I can no longer see anything on their website about it.

So far she hasn't called again. Maybe she did get the C&D that I faxed to her. AmEx has already called a couple of times about the other card, which is now about a week (maybe 10 days) past due. I just tell them that I'm not in front of my computer and can't give them any information and they leave me alone for a few days.

Hurrah for collectors - it's going to be an interesting couple of months. Very soon I'll have the cash together to pay the lawyer and then I can just send them on to him. I'm looking forward to that.

[simon2020]

fireworks, I understand how you feel.

Although my experience has not been as bad as your situation, AMEX did close my Platinum AMEX card (for business) and my AMEX Gold (personal) after being a customer with them since 1986!!

It is really sad my relationship with them had to end like that. I had some good years with them, but unfortunately due to other "higher" type of debt priorities like paying my mortgage and keeping food on the table for the kids, I had to just let the AMEX cards go since I am preparing to file a ch 13 within the next few weeks. (Sorta weird huh, kind of like I had a loooooong relationship with this beautiful woman and after all that of she being nice to me and me being nice to her, we end it with a THANK YOU SIR, BUT YOUR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND CLOSE, NOW PAY UP!!)

[rockyroad]

Try having AMEX cards since 1992 and for the past several years charging (and paying IN FULL) between $150-200k per month with them! Talk about being a valued cardmember...Oh, but not for long when you miss a payment!!!
They really didn't hound me too bad to be honest. They would call, I would tell them my numbers don't add up, charges to dispute and in the process of doing a full audit..Fine, just call us when you can make a payment.
Did receive a "courtesy" call after four months to let me know the account would be charged off and reported to my personal credit.
Then Nationwide Credit steps in....OH JOY! Just wait til those jokers take over trying to collect. Don't answer the calls and then James West attorney will be calling. Don't answer his calls and then.....I'll keep you posted on what happens next!

[Trixie007]

From the sound of things, I'm glad I cancelled our AMEX account years ago! We used to use our AMEX back in the day when we rarely carried a cc balance, I loved it that I couldn't carrry a balance on it. I was used to the merchants having to call in for verification that it was me using the card, they did that all the time, but...

Then came the time I took my kids out of town for the weekend, stayed in a hotel, was eating out in restaurants, and took the kids to the mall to buy clothes - we always did the big back to school shopping.

They never bothered me while I was shopping, but a rep called my husband, who was at home, and asked "Do you know where your wife is?". DH said yes, then the guy asked "Do you know how much she's spending?". This guy called and tattled on me!! I called the next week and closed the account.

[BigJohn]

From the sound of things, I'm glad I cancelled our AMEX account years ago! We used to use our AMEX back in the day when we rarely carried a cc balance, I loved it that I couldn't carrry a balance on it. I was used to the merchants having to call in for verification that it was me using the card, they did that all the time, but...

Then came the time I took my kids out of town for the weekend, stayed in a hotel, was eating out in restaurants, and took the kids to the mall to buy clothes - we always did the big back to school shopping.

They never bothered me while I was shopping, but a rep called my husband, who was at home, and asked "Do you know where your wife is?". DH said yes, then the guy asked "Do you know how much she's spending?". This guy called and tattled on me!! I called the next week and closed the account.

Nice people.

[FloridaGuy]

Here's another one....

I had 4 amex cards two business, and two personal. One the business green card in my busy months... I would charge 15K - 30K a month. I had used my persoanl accounts for business as well, and racked up a fair balance, but was still making payments, no problem.

One day I went to use my personal green card for a $200 purchase, and it was declined. Whoa! I called amex, and they stated I had exceeded my monthly average balnce. But wait a minute... I havn't used this card in months.

I finally get to a supervisor, and am told they have now associated the business and personal acounts... and the average monthly charge was based on all acounts. I had last weekend made a $5K charge on the business green account. I went ballistic! This wasn't even my busy season yet... said look back at the last few years of purchases, etc. etc.

Anyway, she stated due to the number of even "prefered" black card holders, etc. sticking them with bankruptcies, and bad debt... they had to change their policies, etc. (This was a 6 months before I new we'd have to do BK ourselves)

I exclaimed I better not have problems going to use the card in the future!

Fast Forward 10 months... I filed BK. Two days after filing... they closed all accounts. Business, and personal. I ended up sticking them with about a $55K Loss.

[catleg]

Good work sticking them for 55k. My two cards had limits of 23k and 21k and got cut to 3500 and 500. The only redeeming value is the interest rates are reasonable, like 8.9% and 13.49% otherwise I'd stop paying in a second.

[rockyroad]

Well you guys have treated them "nice" compared to me.
I owe $186k on the biz Open Gold Card PLUS $48k on the personal Gold Card.
Biz account charged off and sent to CA
Personal Card accumulating thousands of interest every month.

Surely the writing is on the wall with them as to where I'm headed...

Now I will say that well into my default on the Biz card, they were still allowing charges on the personal. They finally cut me off at the $48k mark and started calling asking me to pay down the balance so they could "re-open" my line of credit.
Thanks to you guys on these boards, I didn't fall for it!

[LDL]

I'm still NEW here and trying to understand all the rules. Some other forums only allow links so as to not have copyright issues. But I saw this blog and an article tonight on AMEX and thought I would share both them with you.

January 31, 2009
Your Money
American Express Kept a (Very) Watchful Eye on Charges
By RON LIEBER
You probably know that credit card companies have been scrutinizing every charge on your account in recent years, searching for purchases that thieves may have made. Turns out, though, that some of the companies have been suspicious of your own spending, too.

In recent months, American Express has gone far beyond simply checking your credit score and making sure you pay on time. The company has been looking at home prices in your area, the type of mortgage lender you’re using and whether small-business card customers work in an industry under siege. It has also been looking at how you spend your money, searching for patterns or similarities to other customers who have trouble paying their bills.

In some instances, if it didn’t like what it was seeing, the company has cut customer credit lines. It laid out this logic in letters that infuriated many of the cardholders who received them. “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped,” one of those letters said, “have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

It sure sounded as if American Express had developed a blacklist of merchants patronized by troubled cardholders. But late this week, American Express told me that wasn’t the case. The company said it had also decided to stop using what it has called “spending patterns” as a criteria in its credit line reductions.

“The letters were wrong to imply we were looking at specific merchants,” said Susan Korchak, a company spokeswoman. The company uses hundreds of data points in making its decisions, she said, adding that the main factor in determining credit lines “has always been and still is the overall level of debt, relative to the card member’s financial resources.”

The company will still have plenty of other data to judge your creditworthiness, though. American Express executives have spoken candidly to investors and analysts about its deep dives into your data.

A spokesman for Citigroup says that it is using some mortgage data to help it make credit decisions, but it is not using specific store data or looking at types of merchandise purchased. A spokeswoman for Capital One said that geography was one of many factors it considered and that it, too, did not make decisions based on where people shop.

Bank of America and Chase declined to comment on precisely how their underwriting works, though it’s safe to assume that they and other companies are looking at more data more carefully than they ever have before.

In the grave new world of the ever-worsening economy, lenders of all sorts are grasping for any sort of information that may shield them from ruin. In recent investor presentations, American Express executives have noted how much better the company’s data-mining capabilities are than they were during the last two downturns.

As technological advances give banks better tools and exponentially more information on who their customers are and what they do all day, they no longer have to wait long to tweak their formulas. “We have clients changing risk policies daily, depending on what they see in the marketplace,” said Dennis Dixon, the president of Zoot, a technology company in Four Corners, Mont., that helps banks and others make credit decisions.

The question, then, is how much of the data they can use before spooking their customers. Kevin D. Johnson, a 29-year-old Atlanta resident who runs a marketing and communications firm, received a letter from American Express last October saying that his credit limit was being lowered. One reason was that other customers who had used their cards at places where he had shopped were late in paying their bills.

The company couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell him which charges had met with its disapproval. Frustrated, he told his story to the local newspaper and on “Good Morning America.” He also began documenting his experience on newcreditrules.com, where he posted the names of all the merchants he patronized, in the hope that other American Express customers would cross-check his list with theirs and solve the mystery.

When I queried the company this week, before it changed its policy, I noted that if it wouldn’t tell people which establishments were suspect, people would have no choice but to guess. The truly paranoid, presumably, would stop using American Express cards altogether.

But American Express couldn’t possibly go public with such a list. If it did, the merchants on the list, who generally pay the company a lot of money to accept its cards, would have a fit and hurl their Amex terminals into the nearest body of water.

Now, the company says that there never was such a list. So what about the language in its letters to cardholders, which calls out particular “establishments” where cardholders had shopped, I asked. Well, apparently that was all just a big misunderstanding, despite the number of people who must have been in on drafting the notes in the first place.

American Express wouldn’t have been the first company to try cordoning off certain industries. Last year, CompuCredit, a subprime lender, got in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for failing to disclose that it could reduce customers’ credit lines for using their cards at various establishments.

What was on CompuCredit’s no-go list? Marriage counselors, tire retreading and repair shops, bars and nightclubs, pool halls, pawnshops and massage parlors, among others.

Robert Manning, a longtime critic of the industry and the author of “Credit Card Nation,” also pointed out that American Express ran the risk of discouraging a lot of virtuous behavior. “If someone shops at the Dollar Store, he’s a prudent steward of his financial resources, but the blunt instruments at Amex suggest that he’s changing his financial behavior,” he said. “There’s this ecological fallacy that if I suddenly make a charge at Wal-Mart, my line of credit would get bumped down.”

But while American Express has pulled back from snooping on your shopping, it’s still paying attention to other ways you spend. In one presentation to analysts, it noted that people with multiple residences and multiple mortgages used to be a good bet. Now, the reverse is true.

The company is also using credit reports to identify your mortgage lender. If it’s a subprime lender or one that has gone bankrupt, that could affect the size of your credit line. Borrowers do not necessarily have a say in determining who ends up owning or servicing their mortgage, though. Ms. Korchak, the American Express spokeswoman, said that customers should call the company if they think there is any confusion about the identity of their original lender.

American Express has also been looking at the health of the industries where its small-business cardholders work. If you’re a dentist, say, you may have less trouble with the card company than if you work in construction or finance. Al Kelly, the company’s president, said in a presentation in August that it had made changes in credit limits “by looking at industries that are facing, or might face, incremental stress.” The “might face” could encompass all sorts of industries of the company’s choosing.

So if you want to keep your credit unchanged, it now makes sense to actively manage your credit portfolio and look at it even more frequently than you do your investments.

If a card company lowers your credit limit, for instance, it can hurt your credit score, since one factor in your creditworthiness is how much of your available credit you’re using at any given time. You want that percentage to be as low as possible, so you may have to pay down debt or use your cards less.

That said, if you have a high credit limit, that may make you a target, too. American Express has said it is keeping a particularly close eye on those customers.

If it feels as if you simply can’t win here, remember that you do have choices. You can avoid credit cards in most instances. Or you can join a credit union or look to smaller banks, where better deals may be available.

Card companies presume that you’ll suck it up and pay more or adjust your spending if they change their terms on you. But because they deploy such different tactics, you have the opportunity to leave one company and patronize another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/31money.html?em

http://www.newcreditrules.com/

[SobStory]

That kind of behavior smacks of redlining, designed to punish lower income and minorities. They made it illegal in mortgage lending. They should make illegal in credi cards.

[BigJohn]

I know a few businesses that got stuck with high interest rates and what they did was pay the balance off. Maybe that is what Amex wants?

[fireworks]

So tonight I check my online banking, and there's a debit from my account to AMEX. I specifically went to their website and discontinued the automatic payments, since they're obviously incapable of handling it properly. Tomorrow I'll be going in to the bank to open a new bank account and formally object to that debit. I bank at a small local place where the people know me and I have no doubt that they'll work with me on this. I'll give it a week for any outstanding payments and checks to clear before I close out the old account. AMEX can...you fill in the blank.

I've still gotten calls from the collection agency a couple times a week. As of today (yesterday I guess by now) I've officially retained a lawyer with the intention of filing Ch. 7 as soon as I can get my income tax filed and the rest of my paperwork in order. Tomorrow morning I will happily answer the phone when AMEX calls, give them his number and hang up. Hurrah!

[catleg]

Yeah suspicious things happen. I had a card which I had never paid online before somehow start paying the minimum due from an account I had never used for anything besides the mortgage when I was about 2 months past due with chase. i think someone took it upon themselves to "help" me.

[fireworks]

I really don't want to say I told you so...but...I did...LOL

Yup...should've listened. BOA has the same account number on file (or had...).

What REALLY rubs me about AMEX is that they're calling every couple of days to try and collect, and they're still taking payments out of my bank account. WTF? If they took the payment, the account should be current, no?

[catleg]

So tonight I check my online banking, and there's a debit from my account to AMEX. I specifically went to their website and discontinued the automatic payments, since they're obviously incapable of handling it properly. Tomorrow I'll be going in to the bank to open a new bank account and formally object to that debit. I bank at a small local place where the people know me and I have no doubt that they'll work with me on this. I'll give it a week for any outstanding payments and checks to clear before I close out the old account. AMEX can...you fill in the blank.

I've still gotten calls from the collection agency a couple times a week. As of today (yesterday I guess by now) I've officially retained a lawyer with the intention of filing Ch. 7 as soon as I can get my income tax filed and the rest of my paperwork in order. Tomorrow morning I will happily answer the phone when AMEX calls, give them his number and hang up. Hurrah!

All is not lost. Dispute it as an unauthorized ACH transaction. I believe banks call this a Regulation E claim/dispute/violation.

The worst is when you try to close an account and you have an overdraft credit line attached to it, and they tell you that any transactions that post within 30 days will reopen the account! Yikes. I went to an ATM and withrew the amount of the credit line in cash to max it out just to make sure they wouldn't pay anybody that came along with another one of these drafts. I think I could have disputed a couple that flowed through in the past but I decided to just be done with it.