This is Round 40 in our Worst Company in America contest, Capital One vs AT&T!Here’s what readers said in previous rounds about why they hate these two companies…

Capital One:

“they’re a bunch of dicks that constantly send me auto loan offers even though they won’t give me a credit limit of more than $500 and a shitty as hell APR.”

“If you’ve EVER had to call Crapital One’s customer service, the decision would be very clear to you. Being passed off to one incompetent rep after another, then transferred to the Spanish speaking line, then hung up on (elapsed time: 1 hour) is not awesome.”

“I’m tired of them wanting to know what’s in my wallet.”

“They issued my daughter, who has terrible credit and no job a credit card a few months back. I’m sure they must have known, with her credit score and rating that she would never make the payments. So of course now she has late fees on top of late fees on top of an unpaid balance. Not saying it is their fault she is not paying her bill of course, but what the hell kind of business sense does it make to give someone a credit card when they have such bad credit?

America, no wonder we are on the road to ruin.”

“Capital One sends us two credit card offers a week. Like clockwork.”

“I have a personal history with capital one & really HATE them with a passion. Back in the day when I was not as consumer savvy…. I had a card through them. Even though I ALWAYS paid my bill on time every month, for some reason (at least 3-4 times a year) I would incur their $25 late fees. I believe this is because they have a special “processing facility” (in atlanta I think) that’s sole purpose is to delay mailed payments before sending them off to the final payment processing place. This was just a theory I had long ago to explain why the bills I sent off way ahead of time didn’t make it on time somehow.

There was also an issue when i went to cancel the card because of their late fee shenanigans. They kept keeping minute interest amounts on my card so they could keep me as a customer (talking about like less than 3 dollars). I had to LITERALLY OVERPAY to get it to where they would finally cancel my account. The miserable bastards!”

“Capital One sucks. I frequently carry a small balance on my card, always pay on time and never go over my limit, they’re bombarding me with home loan offers now that I’m looking to buy a house, and I have a 780 credit score… YET, for some reason, will NOT raise my card’s credit limit over $700. WTF?

I can’t even buy a new fridge for the house I’m planning to purchase with that limit. I have the cash to pay, but want the added benefits/protections of buying it with a credit card, and don’t want to have to open a new card to do it. Looks like I may have no choice…”

“

Voted for Crapital One… I have a card with them.

A year back, I applied for a secured card, where I had to put a deposit on it. Granted, I didd’t have a credit history, and only had 1 other card open at that time (with my bank, and the limit was $500.00) I could see why they would charge me.

Fast forward 11 months later.. I now have 6 (yep thats right) 6 credit cards. That old card I had before Capital One, well now it’s a gold card (Gold Cards in Canada, excluding Crapital one have to be a credit limit of $5k or higher), I have another US dollar card with a 5k limit, and 2 other gold cards from major banks.

What does Crapital do? Well they see I am not using my card, so they raise the limit to $1500.00 and dont want to budge on ever getting my security deposit back or getting rid of the damn annual fees! All my cards have 0.00 annual fee with the major banks, if Crapital wants to play, why dont they play fair!

Now I am getting purchasing checks every 2 weeks like clockwork… I am waiting until next month, thats when my 1 year anniversary with them is up and either they are changing my card to no annual fee and refunding my deposit, or I am cancelling “

“C1 sends my son, the unemployed college student, at least three offers a week. I usually intercept them (the Postmaster General can bite my hairy white ass) and run them through the shredder unopened, but just in case, I also made sure the kid gets the utter illogic of someone like him being in possession of a credit card. I’d almost rather see him join the Marines than get hooked up with Capitol One.”

“I voted for C1 because the amount of paper they mail out, and the resulting ecological impact of all the dead trees and all the spent fuel of the mail trucks is atrocious.”

AT&T:

“AT&T’s willingness to help the government illegally spy on citizens that elevates them pretty much to the level of absolute scum.”

“knowingly illegal colluding with the government + blatant attempt at monopolizing the telecom industry is really, really bad form.”

“Now the problem I’m having with Ma Bell right now is that she’s charging me Utility User Taxes for a jurisdiction I don’t live in or have any connection to whatsoever. It’s about $15 a month and it’s adding up. I’ve called and faxed over official statements from my city’s clerk and they insist I have to pay the taxes of the neighboring city. My zip code bleads into the big city so they insist I should be paying their taxes. I had this same problem with Verizon and they cried the whole administrative burden defense and said sorry we can’t help you. After awhile I gave up because it was at the time an immaterial amount due to having a lower bill.”

“Gee, didn’t AT&T get broken up just a few years back into a lot of baby Bells because it was a huge, arrogant monopoly. And now it’s right back to AT&T and being a huge, arrogant monopoly again. WTF. Don’t we ever learn?”

“AT&T got my vote for helping W take a dump on the Constitution and for having poor customer service. Bonus points for that time in college when they charged me $7 for a 1 minute payphone call.”

“hey sent my 84 year old father a CD for the $10 DSL which gave instructions for him to click here to finish and they left out the button to click to finish. I thought well maybe at 84 he can’t see the button so I checked and sure enough it was missing so it couldn’t be downloaded. So I tried to call the DSL number to find out why the click here button was missing and why when I tried to order the DSL online (after spending hours trying to find the $10 deal), it said they have no phone account for my father even though he has BOTH local and long distance service with AT&T. I got routed to 8 different states, not one of which was mine (NY). Each time they said let me send you to NY and each time I ended up talking to someone in another state who told me that they could not help me because I was from a different state. I said can you just tell me if they have DSL in New York. The answer from all was NOPE. The guy from Alabama asked me if the service he was providing was excellent causing me to spit out my coffee but I said well let’s see if you can send me to a person in NY and then I will let you know. He sent me to Kentucky. I hung up. I will never do business with this company. I am in the process of changing my fathers phone service as well.”

“AT&T is one of the worst companies ever. Even when dead, they managed to come back to life. They have screwed me out of some much money for cell phones and even back in the day for “long distance access”. Remember that crap? I would love to have an iPhone, but will never buy one until they get rid of AT&T.”

This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2008 series. The companies nominated for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. Keep track of all the goings on at consumerist.com/tag/worst-company-in-america

STILL OPEN FOR VOTING: Sallie Mae vs eBay/Paypal, TransUnion vs Diebold, Best Buy vs CompUSA, DeBeers vs Verizon, Exxon vs United Airlines, Sony vs Ticketmaster, Comcast vs The American Arbitration Association

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