Amalia Gets Sucker-punched by AOL/Time Warner and FleetBoston Bank! HOW IT TOOK SIX MONTHS TO RESOLVE A PHONY $23.90 CHARGE

Amalia is a hard working woman. She works eight hours a day, all bundled up in a refrigerated unit, packing seafood salads. Here in California this has to be a form of torture, spending eight hours a day in the cold of a refridgerated room, and then coming out into the heat of day. I won't tell you how much she makes per hour, but you've probably guessed that it is not much above a minimum wage. For years she was a single mother taking care of two children, and she supplemented her earnings by cleaning houses, scrubbing commercial stoves and ovens in restaurants at night, managing the building where she lives, and other odd jobs to support her family. She is frugal, saves her money, zealously protects her credit, and never runs up her single credit card to more than she can pay at the end of the month, unless it is for a medical emergency. That was the way most Americans were taught to manage their finances before the 1980's! It was also before the predatory lending practices of the credit card industry came along and literally enslaved millions of Americans, by enticing them and then burying them deep in debt. FLEETBOSTON/AOL AND INTEGRITY, HA HA HA! Amalia's single credit card is with OFleet FleetBoston, a large Boston-based conglomerate. She does not understand how she ended up with FleetBoston, but about twenty years ago she applied for her one and only credit card, and received ot through her local bank. Subsequently the bank was taken over by another, and the card was transferred to the new bank. That bank too was sold, again she was issued a different card, and sold again, and suddenly she began receiving statements from OFleet. Who knows how these things happen, or why? Amalia had not used her credit card for months when she received a statement in September 2001 from OFleet, with a charge for $23.90. She does not allow anyone else to use her card, so she called in, went through a lengthy process in a phone tree, protested it and asked that it be removed from her account. Usually they will remove the charge until the dispute is settled, but OFleets "customer care" rep refused to do that, and told Amalia that it was an AOL charge, that therefore she must contact AOL. "Who's this AOL?" asked Amalia. "I don't know any AOL. Take off the charge." They told her that AOL was her Internet Service for her computer, so she then informed them she did not have a computer nor use an Internet Service. Therefore, she didn't pay. The following month OFleet added a $35.00 late fee to the original $23.90 charge. Wow, now a disputed bill was up to $58.90! That hurt. That's penalizing her almost a day's pay and the matter wasn't settled yet.

HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN FLEECED OUT OF $$$ BY OFLEET IN THIS FASHION? DISPUTED $23.90, LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB, MUSHROOMS TO $172.33 Amalia called again, and after another fruitless argument, she told them to cancel her card and not knowing any other answer, sent them $23.90.  She had been warnedn that if she didn't pay, they'd carry out their threats to ruin her good credit. The $58.90 they demanded was a whole days pay, before taxes, that she'd be losing, but she thought when she paid the $23.90 and canceled her card, she would be finished with OFleet, and AOL/Time Warner. But was she? Do dogs have fleas? The following month her bill had another $35.00 late charge, plus interest. Then the month after that there was another late charge for not paying a late charge on time. Each month they added additional late charges, and the threat, "You pay, or we'll put it on your credit report!" By the time Amalia talked to me about it, even though she had paid the original bill for AOL and canceled the card with OFleet, her January 2002 bill was up to $172.33, all over a disputed $23.90 charge! Shortly after that she received a letter from OFleet telling her that they had canceled her card, and they had turned it over for collection. A letter came from a collection agency next, with further threats.  Now it was a good part of her week's pay that they were demanding.  No one would accept her story. What had been a $23.90 disputed charge was now a nightmare! Twice she had already taken time off from work to go home and telephone them, costing her lost wages. How does someone unfamiliar with our credit system get through today's maze of phone trees, inhospitable personnel, and uncaring collection agencies? The abuses, especially of immigrants, people whose English or technical knowledge is not sufficient, and lower income people, are beyond comprehension. HOW MANY PEOPLE HAS OFLEET (FleetBoston) SCREWED LIKE THIS?

AOL KEEPS CLOCK RUNNING, AND THAT BILL IS UP TO $95.60! In the meantime, the clock was running for Amalia with AOL Online as well. On January 29, 2002 she received a letter from the AOL Billing Department, claiming that she owed them $95.50 as well. Her disputed $23.90 bill was now almost $300.00, and she has absolutely nothing to show for it. Her bill was in nether world, for something intangible. If this were an isolated instance, it might be forgiveable, but as anyone can plainly see, with AOL it must be endemic. Computer geeks are more often than not, arrogant, and they show a disdain for those who are not on their level in this new and fascinating, yet confusing world. That arrogance is too prevalent, like a person who has studied Greek or Latin feeling superior to those who have little or no comprehension of it. When this situation was brought to my attention, I immediately thought about her two children, how hard she had always worked to support them and here here's little wonder-boy and billionaire Stevie's AOL Online bilking her? So, I questioned Oscar, who is 14 and living at home. Oscar knows better, and he would never charge anything on his mother's card. Or, would he? No, not knowingly. Someone had given Oscar a CD with "500 FREE Hours" on it, and when his sister was home from college, she had brought her Laptop with her and allowed him to use it. I guess when you put it in the computer, it asks for a credit card number and his sister put in her mother's card number. After all, she was leaving in a few weeks, and he had 500 FREE hours, so there would be no charges on the card. Right? Wrong assumption. The guys at AOL Online are not dumb, they've hooked another sucker with that supposedly "500 Free Hours" story. Most likely it says in fine print that if you do not cancel, they automatically continue to charge you. Oscar is 14 years old, so what does he know about how big business throws sucker-punches that can harm his mother? Fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year olds are unsophisticated, and its obvious that thousands of them have fallen into this "FREE" trap, or rather "FREE" claptrap. And, what does Amalia, working every day in a refridgerator know about computers or about AOL? There are thousands more like her too, trapped in a maze that begins with confusing phone trees, regulations, contracts in small print, and people trained to collect...no matter what the problem. From her Sept. statement for $23.90 until today, she's now almost $300.00 in debt and hasn't one thing to show for it. HOW MANY OTHER LOW INCOME PEOPLE HAS AOL SCREWED LIKE THIS? NEWS FLASH.(L.A. Times) May 15, 2002. FleetBoston Financial Corp. Bilked for $130 Million! Four small-time pip-squeaks (who went big-time) were charged with scamming a number of huge banking institutions, over a two year period, for almost a billion dollars. Among them were the Armani-suited astute financial wizards at FleetBoston. These wizards only lost $130 million of that amount, though! Wow. Obviously they know how to shaft the little people for $23.90 or $29.00 each month, but when it comes to handling the millions they take in, they haven't got a clue. They ought to resign en-masse, from the CEO on down, and put a few people who understand basic arithmetic in their places. For that the suspected crooks face up to five years in jail. I'd say for not doing due diligence that they ought to be joined in jail by the OFLEET people who loaned them the money. That's almost as criminal for dereliction of duty as the crime itself. Unbelievable! How were the perpretrators caught? Simple. A J.P. Morgan genius visited them and found a door with a peep-hole, and inside a guy using a ten dollar shredder to destroy documents. (He'd obviously read the Enron Chronicles and learned something from them.) If it had been a two hundred dollar shredder, the visitor might not have noticed a thing wrong. You can fool all of the executives some of the time, and some of the executives all of the time, but not all of these smart bankers all of the time. Or so they claim. Duh? Well, that won't bother OFleet too much. they know that $130 million is only a 4 1/2 million late-fee charges! If they just don't open the mail for two days a few times a month, they can have it in short order! Whoops, sorry, I forgot. Wasn't that Lesson # 1, they once taught Bankers going into the credit card business: "Lose or Delay Opening the Mail to Increase Profits Dramatically?" Click here to send this web site to a friend. JAMES Like Afghanistan's Minefields, Today, Financial Minefields Are Everywhere! Instead of blowing off legs, they're shattering people's financial lives, their credit ratings, and more importantly, their peace of mind. They invade your home and privacy, like thieves in the night. The signs of it are everywhere, if you only stop and think about it. Financial writers must be living in a dream world if they cannot see it, and if they don't sound the alarm. The wonderful world that we were promised by Visa and MasterCard in their early days simply doesn't exist. The features they stressed, safety from forged checks, safety from armed robbery if you carried cash, detailed statements for expense purposes, reliability, quick access to cash, travel worry-free, are all figments of imaginative public relations departments of these corporations whose sole mission is to milk, milk (and some, bilk, bilk, bilk) the buying public. The truth is that the multiciplicity of credit cards and the ease with which they are obtained opens more doors to opportunists and crooks. The credit card safety promised us was nothing more than a lure and a pipe dream. Every year there are thousands of new Oscars and Amalias out there, just ripe for the plucking. The latest CD I received in the mail from AOL stresses the FREE hours, but this one says in large letters across the front: NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED. The most obvious reason for this change in policy is probably...that AOL/Time Warner has had so many complaints and charge-backs that they finally got the message! If the truth were known we would probably find that my estimates are way too low, and that scores of thousands of people have been victimized in a manner similar to Amalia's case. After taking over from Amalia, I wrote to the head office of OFleet and outlined the problem. I received a courteous letter back from the Assistant to the President of the Credit Card Division, and they took off all the late charges and interest, but did not refund the original $23.60 she paid out. They admitted that they had notified all three major credit reporting agencies! They said that they would rescind it, but it would take approximately three months before it was completed. Can you imagine deliberately ruining a person's credit over a $23.60 disputed bill? If there is a truth to be made out of Amalia's problem, it is this: credit card accounting and credit card problems are too complex for many families today, and resolving them is far too onerous and time consuming. It is a major reason for so much credit card fraud and the proliferation of credit card scams. Each additional credit card in your wallet increases the risk of fraud, scams, unauthorized charges, and identity theft. Different cards usually have different closing dates, increasing the chance of making late payments and incurring $29 to $35 late fees. Credit reports are literally worthless because of tens of thousands of cases like Amalia v. OFleet.

ANOTHER STORY, AN 81 YEAR OLD WOMAN AND AOL As if that isn't enough, just recently my cousin lost her husband, so I called her to offer my condolences. During our long the conversation and knowing how I'd often written articles about the credit card business, she told me how much trouble she'd been having trying to straighten out an AOL billing for Online Service during her husband's final illness.  First of all, they did not own a computer, but Qwest Communications, her telephone company, refused to take the charges off her bill. Why wouldn't they do so? She didn't authorize it in the first place, but they insisted she, herself, must deal with AOL. Elderly, and unaware of what she faced, she had to call, and deal with more automated voices, Telephone Trees, and waste a lot of time listening to garbage, dialing endless numbers, more hassles from supposed customer service  representatives, all over a stupid $23.90 bill she did not owe, while worrying about a husband who was near death in the hospital.  Not only that, but she faced a continuing charge of $23.90 each and every month by Qwest. My cousin is 81 years old and they have never owned a computer! How can Steve Casey, head honcho of AOL explain things like this? Are they buying mailing lists and then just adding charges to peoples bills? I'm suspicious. It makes me wonder how Steve Casey's firm really made all that money so quickly that they could suddenly buy up Time, Inc. How many other elderly people are being scammed by Qwest and AOL?  Doesn't it make you wonder.  Click here to send this web site to a friend. JAMES

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