complaints
Patricia closed her company's American Express Delta Sky Miles card six months ago, but the expired card unexpectedly sprang to life thanks to a supplier's accidental charge. American Express laughed off the matter, saying "this happens all of the time," adding that it's Patricia's responsibility to ensure that all vendors destroy her outdated billing information.
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readers
Reader Craig ordered some gym equipment from Amazon, but he accidentally used his debit card instead of his credit card. Realizing his mistake, he immediately tried to correct the problem. He went through the change payment process right away and figured all was well. Of course it wasn't, and he ended up getting charged $2,288.44 for $750 worth of equipment when Amazon got the refund process backwards. Twice. See how it happened after the jump.
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personal finance
Consumer Reports staffer Greg Daugherty has gone 30 years without a credit card. Why? He doesn't need one.
I recently reached what I bet is a rare milestone: I have now gone 30 years, basically my entire working life so far, without a credit card.
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billing errors
It's bad enough when a glitch on a retailer's side screws up your method of payment, but Barnes & Noble took so long to investigate and respond to one customer's emails that by the time they acknowledged they'd made a mistake, they said it was too late to do anything about it. Now the customer is left with an unused $25 gift card and a $50 charge on his credit card, twice what he'd approved at check-out.
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excessive force
On November 26th, a 35-year-old woman was shopping at Best Buy in Daytona Beach, Florida when there was some sort of communication breakdown, and a police officer who was at the store tasered her. We
wrote about it here, and it turns out
there's a video of the event here. At the time there were few details, but the full story has
since been pieced together and resolved, and last week the Florida state attorney said "charges won't be pursued because there is no evidence that Beeland committed a crime."
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fraud
The Daytona Beach Police Department say that a woman was tasered last Monday inside of a Best Buy store after attempting to use someone else's credit card to make a purchase.
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stop and shop
From the Boston Globe:
"With help from US Secret Service agents, Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos. executives scrambled yesterday to determine how many consumers may have had their credit and debit card data stolen by high-tech thieves who apparently broke into checkout-line card readers and planted the equivalent of bugs to steal information."
Stop and Shop stores with confirmed stolen info:
Coventry and Cranston, R.I.
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debt
T'is a pity for the flower of youth to be wrinkled by the radioactive belch of credit card debt. Yesterday, we asked the readers about how college boy L.S. should get out of his $2150 in credit card debt set at exorbitant rates and here's what we think he should do.
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hacks
Here
s a nifty way to take master your credit card debt. Punch into John Madea's free analyzer the APR, minimum monthly payment percentage, the principal and monthly payment.
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shopping
Reader Rik P. wants to know about your favorite rewards programs:
I think it would be useful to poll folks on how they feel about the various credit card reward programs out there. My girlfriend has been using one of those frequent flyer mile credit cards and has yet to earn anything close to a free trip, despite three years of charging.
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