Posted on 02/01/2009 10:35:27 PM PST by Lorianne
Here's the latest reason to hate credit card companies: Shop at Wal-Mart, obviously a sign of financial distress, and your credit limit gets lowered. Hallelujah!
This is from American Express, which has now decided to hunker down and simply lie about their habit of doing this. Compare and contrast the following news accounts. When Kevin Johnson returned from his honeymoon last year he got a letter from Amex saying, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.” Here's what they told the Atlanta Journal Constitution about this in December:
“We’re just doing this to manage risk,” said Lisa A. Gonzalez, an American Express spokeswoman. She declined to say which retailers or mortgage companies are associated with consumers with higher default rates. She said it makes sense to examine these factors because “customers who have loans outstanding with certain lenders or customers who make transactions with certain merchants tend to have a higher proportion of credit issues or a higher probability of default.”
And here's what they told the New York Times this week:
“The letters were wrong to imply we were looking at specific merchants,” said Susan Korchak, a company spokeswoman....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.
So: a month ago monitoring your transactions with "certain merchants" was a legitimate way of managing risk. This month the story is that they were never doing it in the first place. You betcha.
Bastards. I really hate these guys and their entire sleazy industry. More here. Kevin Johnson's website is here.
I wouldn’t even know if we have a dedicated computer shop locally these days. All purchases off the net. Coincidentally, the e7300 is roughly what I am targeting as well.
We use Chase for our CC and we’ve had them put a hold on our card if they think the activity is suspicious (which we appreciate.) Once we bought a computer at the Apple Stores, and they charged out the computer, the software, and the accessories as three different charges, and Chase wouldn’t put the transactions through until they checked with us.
So, after looking around at the overpriced packaged systems being offered to fill my needs, the ol CCard and hrs of shopping in my recliner ensued. I'm doing these 2 for the price of 1 store bought frozen.
btw, that Q6700 is a great video processor if running a 8500 GT / 512 MB equivalent or higher.
My job also entails me to keep up with such though I work primarily with optical communications.
Anyway, still doesn't prevent downloading / uploading a trojan, virus etc.
Well, I can say one thing, glad I've managed my credit well as to have a CCard for the above....otherwise, I'd been stuck with shopping for less than I want for more money.
BTW, I'm waiting to hear the banks pi$$ & moan soon (w/in 8 months) over all the credit card defaults that come after a while from those struggling and haven't been able to find work. Remember 2003 recession and the soon afterward bankruptcy laws were changed?
Follow the link above to the blog entry and you'll find the "in December" embedded link which leads you to the long and comprehensive NYT article, which has numerous embedded links
Absolutely. I get a 30 day + float on anything I buy, a 2.5% cash back on anything - provided of course that I pay it all off at the end of the month. It’s free money if you manage it.
Plus I don’t have to carry much cash on me and if the card is lost/stolen I call within a few hours and it’s disabled and a new one is on the way.
I had a card up to a few years ago that had points for a book store. Our family reads A LOT - I didn’t pay for a book during the entire 9 years I held it. Filled 3 bookshelves+. Now that’s an investment. (then they decided to charge a fee - sigh)
I normally run a MB for about 5 years, although the laptops are a little older. Don’t think I’ve ever had a MB actually fail on me. I do use MAC filtering on the router also.
Right now have a bizarre problem on the desktop where accelerated video for HD playback with Xine is suddenly not working. This was one of the most reliable things. Needless to say I didn’t watch any HD content over the weekend. Xine will play audio for a couple of seconds, then hang. But once in a hundred tries or so it will play A&V just fine even with acceleration for a couple minutes until it crashes. Now the strange thing is it’s happening with every kernel I have (newest is 2.6.27.10) and different Nvidia drivers. Without the vxmc motion compensation it works, although the old Sempron and mx400 can’t begin to keep up. I’m going to build a special kaffeine with xvmc later today to try. Haven’t got mplayer to show HD video yet and haven’t yet tried mythtv with the HD card (although it does work with the ntsc card).
I used many balance transfer offers which were a Godsend after I had to quit working. Have been reliably paying off at low rates for years. Next year, though, some will expire and I will be in deep doodoo unless I can refinance. Could take the money out of an IRA and pay off but that is truly a last resort. However, at this rate there may not be any banks left with operating A/R departments to accept the payments — only half joking. If the government is “the bank” by then I will BK.
But....you can’t function in society if you don’t have a credit card!!!!!! </s>
I have had more than one ‘discussion’ here on FR about how I couldn’t possibly live a decent life without a credit card. (And then these same people complain about their CC fees—if you want to borrow money, you gotta play by the lender’s rules). We live on a cash only basis, and pretty much all we use our debit cards for is to buy gas.
To make us even more weird, we don’t have a car payment either. Haven’t gone hungry, have clothes on my back, a roof over my head, a tank of gas, and am able to put my kids through Catholic school without relying on credit. Once we finish paying off the dh’s student loan (about another $4k to go), we only have a mortgage left. We have emergency savings and another account for stuff like house repairs, vet bills, car maintenance, and Christmas.
Even with the economy the way it is, I sleep pretty well at night.
I’m a consultant in banking, and any bank not adhering to the zero-liability contracts in place with Visa, on cards carrying the Visa logo, are in breach of their contracts. Max liability is $50, period. I’m not certain what the particulars are for the author of the link you posted, but I have personally had my debit number stolen twice, and Visa caught it both times and I endured no liability either time, with funds replaced the very next day.
That kind of stuff can backfire on you, too. I charged a purchase on the internet in Oregon and two hours later tried to make a purchase in my home town at a gun shop. My CC company declined the second charge requiring me to use another card.
When I called Chase, the person on the phone (who spoke broken English) explained that it was impossible for me to charge something in Oregon and Indiana that close together. It was a fraud trigger. The next day I called the Fraud department at Chase and calmly explained that if they ever declined another charge without checking with me first, I would cancel the card on the spot.
They did and I did.
I work for an online retailer. We use AVS and a couple other means of checking the invoices that come in. Sometimes our customer’s are annoyed, but mostly they’re relieved when we ask for a call or try to contact them because their bill to/ship to is different, or because they’ve placed multiple orders in a short space of time.
We’ve had fraud, in the past, when the AVS pasted muster, but the ship to was to a different address. In fact, one time, it was to a vacant house, and the perp was using a stolen card number (and they knew the CCV code), so there were no flags on our end. But they had it shipped to a vacant house, and used the tracking number we send to know when the package was to arrive. Local police in that city helped us and I believe they were able to arrest the guy and our company wasn’t the only one he was ripping off.
So certain items, over a specific dollar amount, using a different bill to/ship to will get extra scrutiny from us. If we can’t connect the ship to to the customer (using databases and other tools), we attempt to contact the legitimate phone number at the bill to, or verify a cell is listed to that person and call them to make sure they want their order shipped to a different address.
I've read that ATI drivers do not support XvMC. I assume you are running XP/Vista??
Sounds like a recent possible MS OS security update (browser plug-in related) that conflicts with your DRM?
Geeze, the stuff I've had to bone up on the last 4 years since the push for 'the need for speed' has come about.
If you are running a MS OS, maybe you should try going back to a past restore point before the problem showed up.
As far as running the old Dell for my purposes front-end purposes. seems as though it shouldn't be an issue with Linux.
Even with all that said, still a monthly bill for TiVo is BS.....I like HD, but, I've lived long enough to know the old VCR worked well for years. It's just nice tying in new PC's into the HT and using it to record for free.
That new Q6700 system plays regular DVD's much better than my Toshiba (2003) DVD player using the same monitor and that's using component out to the 28" LCD monitor from both sources. The OTA tuner box uses HSMI to the monitor - only one on the LCD.
Good luck with your 'hobby' headache...you'll get it working.
If true, may be sleazy. But then, no one has a “right” to a line of credit in any specific amount.
I thought American Express cards had no pre-set spending limit? I use my Amex green card at the local warehouse store, a couple of carry-out restaurants, and that’s it. So I guess Costco, Scarpatti’s Pizza, and the Chinese Palace count as up-scale retailers.
I understand the issue as it is being reported. But I don’t make purchases that even approach my credit limit, much less exceed it, mainly because my beginning balance each month is $0.
However, for those people that love paying banks tohusands of $$$ a year in credit card interest I can see how this could be a problem. If they had a higher credit limit, they could transfer even more of their wealth to the banks in monthly interest payments.
No, it is Mandriva Linux 2009. The kernel version and Linux app names should have clued you into that!
So far, what I've seen about Linux, I like. Most of my programming experience has been in FORTRAN, PL1/PLC and HP Basic, DOS in years past. Windows has been an ongoing learning process with its headaches / stability / changes upgrades, writing macros for Excel, debugging other's Viz Basic routines, etc. We're strictly Windoze here at work other than the UNIX mainframes (2) which I have no interaction with.
If I had never shopped there, and all of a sudden started shopping at discount stores, I can see why AMEX would get worried.
H-hah-hah-hah!
Thank you for that point...which almost singlehandedly validates my contention about the questionable source.
“If it’s in ‘The Times’ - it ain’t fit for newsprint!”
A.A.C.
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