An Open Letter To Chase Bank Visa

Dear Chase Bank,

After twenty-three years as a Chase Visa credit-card holder in good standing, my wife's Chase Visa card was recently cancelled, your company falsely claiming she was 120 days overdue. Not only is this not true, as she did send you checks for hundreds of dollars in the past several months (we can prove this, of course), but I believe this "overdue amount" was a product of your own dubious business practices. On at least one occasion this year, Chase Visa failed to deliver a monthly bill to our home. This, of course, led to no check being delivered to you (or delivered to you late) and conveniently triggered a much higher interest rate and various late fees which I believe may have been agreed to somewhere deep in her original or modified-by-mail (innumerable times) credit contract (which, I'm convinced, nobody but your lawyers has ever read).

When my wife finally did receive a bill from Chase Visa, the minimum amount due was far more than she could afford to pay. You see, recently my wife lost her good paying job due to cut-backs in the ever-popular "global economy" - which was then replaced by a new American specialty known as the "McJob", a service industry gig which hardly pays subsistence wages and, of course, no benefits. In the past, making a double-payment on "the card" due to some oversight on your part, or her part, would not have been a problem. But making such a payment now, at $8 an hour, is, frankly, an impossibility.

No, I think that if you truly want to collect the nearly ten-thousand dollars you claim my wife now owes you (thanks to her not understanding the details of "compound interest" and the ever-deepening debt she will incur even while faithfully making her monthly minimum payment [a crime of "usery" itself, in my opinion] - oh, and by being too proud to come to me for help), you will have to waive this year's late fees and cut her interest rate by more than half. It's the least you could do for a faithful twenty-three year customer from whom you've collected tens of thousands of dollars in interest over the years (and may collect thousands of dollars more from if you treat her fairly) who has now fallen on harder times.

If not, and you insist on sending this collection to a bunch of lawyers whose dubious practices rival even you own, you will not enjoy anything but the satisfaction of marring her credit, which she can't really afford to use anyway.


Your call....


Signed: The angry husband of a very dissatisfied customer.