Call center representatives who handle Macy’s credit card inquiries are starting to wonder what’s wrong with reader Melannie. She keeps making $150 payments on her account, but she doesn’t owe anything. She hasn’t even used the card since 2009. They can refund her the overpayment, but that’s not the problem. Because she never made the payment in the first place.

A couple weeks ago I received an email from Macy’s thanking me for my payment of $150 that I made. I shredded my Macy’s card back in 2009. I got worried thinking someone had somehow opened an account under my name (& is making payments?). I called them right away to ask them what was going on. I was very confused. The Payment had been made on that Monday, the same day I had gone shopping there but i couldn’t explain how that might’ve happened.

I’m finally greeted by someone & I explain everything. After spending 15 minutes looking for an account I haven’t used in a couple years, he asks me why I made the payment. I explain to him that I hadn’t made any payments & if he could check who did or what was going on with my account? He taps his keyboard for a while & then says to me “you didn’t need to make any payments so you overpayed.”

I said, “I didn’t make a payment. I don’t have a card with you anymore, why would I make a payment? I just received an email telling me someone did & I want to who because it wasn’t me. Is someone using my account?”

As to which he delightfully responded “No, no one is using your account. You didn’t have anything to pay, so why did you make the payment?”

After going back & forth for about 20 minutes repeating how I DIDN’T MAKE A PAYMENT! He comes to the conclusion that I OVERPAID & Macy’s owed me the money. I’ll be honest, I said ok. He said they’ll send me a check for the extra money that I paid. I was put on hold for another 17 minutes then I’m hung up on.

I called back, asked to speak to a supervisor. They get me to one & I explain the entire thing, including the last call. They tapped on their keyboard a bit & explained that money wasn’t mine (duh) & that it was someone else’s payment.

They said “sometimes when we enter someone’s account number to make their payment, the last few numbers are mixed up & it goes to another account. But thank you for your honesty, we will remove the payment from your account right away.” I thought Wow, people need to be more careful. That was the end of that, that was about 2 weeks ago. I received an email stating that my account was at $0 like it should be.

This morning I received an email. It was from Macy’s. It said my account was ready for viewing. I logged in only to see my account is at -$150 again. Will this person ever get their payment through?

If you make payments to your Macy’s account, make sure they’re getting your account number correct. EVERY SINGLE DIGIT! …or your payment may end up in someone else’s account.

If what the representative says is true, this seems like a poorly designed system. When a single data entry error can lead to misdirected phantom payments which most customers might not even bother to report, and customers lose out.

As it turns out, maybe reader Kate is the source of that mystery cash. She experienced the exact opposite problem with Macy’s: her payments disappeared into the ether. Two of them.

I hate to charge to my Macy’s credit card ,because it seems like every time I use it I end up getting stung with late charges which always negate whatever discount I get on my current purchase. I far prefer to keep my charges to one general card so I can keep better track. I have an excellent credit rating and would like to keep it like that so I rarely use it but sometimes get tempted when it’s a good discount on whatever I’m buying to use it. The latest time it was required to use it so I could get a garment I wanted that wasn’t available in my size in the store shipped to me for free from their warehouse.

My last bill, I thought I had paid right away, so when I got a notice it was late, I was confused but I paid the total amount off – a week late with a hefty late charge of 25 dollars. This month, I get a bill for 2 whole stupid dollars – an interest charge that carried over. Great! This time I thought, I’m gonna pay it right now. So I pay it online using my checking account and then watch carefully to make sure it applied. But when I check it the next day, it says the payment is pending. And the next day and the next day. Three days later – today – the pending payment vanishes and the amount due is still 2 dollars!

I call Customer service, and the very nice lady (Indian) immediately tells me to check my profile, where they have an address for me on the side. My city and state are missing. She tells me when I ask that they added the city and state fields a couple of months ago, and for ‘some people’ because they hadn’t been filled in yet (no one asked me to fill them in) it would have prevented online check payments from applying.

Apparently I was supposed to immediately get an email if the payment applied and I was supposed to magically know that if I didn’t, something was wrong. Many companies don’t send that email for a day or two, and by that time, like most people I have forgotten about it.

I told the lady, I had received no notices about this problem or that I should fill in these fields, she said she would credit me the late payment and interest charges and apologized many times for my inconvenience. I told her that this did not make their actions right, because they were probably making money hand over fist over everyone’s late charges – only some people she explained – so what, it’s corrupt to cause me to pay high late fees and affect my credit rating with this and not warn the customer that it might happen, I got a dead silence for many minutes.

She credited me the late payment and interest charges and wanted to leave it on the card as credit, but I insisted she send it to me in a check because I no longer trust this card at all.

It’s extremely irritating because Macy’s pushes that card so hard with discounts and special deals if you use it. I’m suspecting they are playing games to get late fees on it.

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