Guns,
AOL, Chase, Citi, Sears, Verizon (just to name a few) are the big sucktion machines clearing ordinary folks' pockets (right after the moment they have cleared your wallet).
Due to the (intentional?) software glitch (or maybe just due to my involuntary mistake) AOL was charging my credit card for two separate accounts at the same time to the same residential address. They did it for 5 or 6 months irrespectively of my protests and multiple letters both to my credit card and AOL itself. Finally, when it became obvious to me that they are playng dirty games, I just refused to deal with AOL anymore. My credit card (after several long calls and at least two of my letters) stopped paying wrongful charges, but probably not before driving the problem into the deadend where they could also rise their own interest rate because AOL sold my "debt" (about $250. including "late payment" charges) to some
agency.
That agency resold it to another agency. At last some wizards sold this "debt" to my bank. All these institutions for several years (!) were showering me with the letters damanding the money (never payng attention to the copies of my letters to AOL and my credit card from which any 3rd grade student can figure out that there was evident AOL accounting scheme directed at the small guy).
Now I had to write a personal letter to the general manager of my bank with a simple threat to publicly disclose all this dirty scheming. That letter worked, but not for long.
I send in time my personal check from my bank account to my credit card. It was something like $16.71 (sixteen and 71/100dollars). But in about a month I received my credit card statement with the late fee. It so happened that at that time I had been working overtime
six days a week for several months. My head was far from being a computer, so only after another month (two months' period for my claims having expired) I found out the gross (intentional?) mistake made by my bank : instead of 'sixteen' dollars they only paid SIX.
As the result, my credit card sharply rose the interest rate, and following it ... my bank rose its interest on my overdraft reserve. The sad joke is the following : both these institutions were owned by the same old family of financial moguls.
But the AOL had its revenge too.
Last year I started to rent my friend's apartment because he split for the greener pastures of the Garden State.
So when changing the name on the phone account I was asked if I would like to have DSL service. My stupid answer was that I did not need it because it's quite enough for me to have my dial-up account. That was a perfect AOL trap. But who knew it ?
This more that funny AOL institution charged me through Verizon (!) for non-existent AOL service for two months even without me having
their account for more than five years. I was able to stop this financial hooliganism with great difficulty because Verizon reps kept on insisting that they have nothing to do with AOL even though the fictitious AOL charges appeared on Verizon bill (!).
My proposal : any public service company (be it transportation, utilities, financial institution, ISP) can't have more than one million customers, and it should also have a sufficient number of representatives (not phone machines) working directly with the customers.
Otherwise it can't be called business, it is scheming.
P.S. And Sears simply revoke my card sometime in the middle of the described above financial manipulations.
