A mom in Connecticut was concerned about the credit card applications her 5-year-old son kept receiving from Capital One, so she contacted the credit bureaus to make sure someone wasn’t stealing her kid’s personal info. She says she was told that a good way to get those applications to stop would be to actually fill one out. The boy would be rejected, obviously, and the mailings would end. But that isn’t exactly how things panned out.

“It got approved instantly within 60 seconds,” she tells Hartford’s WFSB. “So, we then hung up the phone and let them know right away that it shouldn’t have gotten approved. It should have been kicked out because the birthday didn’t match. They said they would handle it and wouldn’t send out the card.”

Lo and behold, a week later that card showed up in the mail. And when she called Capital One from her home phone, it activated the card automatically.

“I pressed 0 for customer service, and I let them know what was going on,” she tells WFSB. “The guy advised me that he couldn’t speak to me because I wasn’t the account holder. He had to talk to Hunter, and when I told him that Hunter was 5 years old he continued to say that I couldn’t talk to him, he had to talk to Hunter.”

It was only after the cardholder’s mom contacted the TV station that Capital One came to its senses, contacting the mom and closing the account.

WFSB says Capital One’s explanation for why the 5-year-old was able to score a platinum card was that the card in question is designed for people with little or no credit… and a strongly held belief in the tooth fairy.

5-Year-Old Gets Platinum Credit Card [WFSB.com]

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