This is what incompetence looks like
…but I won’t look very hard
How to “owe’ $4.74 on a purchase that you never received:
An email message from Comenity Capital Bank regarding my Haband Credit Card account said I owed over $15.00 and my payment was late.
A week ago!
“Why?” you might ask.
Well….I purchased a Christmas present for someone from Haband and was $1.00 shy of qualifying for free shipping.
Soooo…I threw in a $1.97 pair of socks, the cheapest sale item in their virtual store.
When I received the package, there were no socks inside. Worse yet, the present was too small, so I had to send it back.
Haband issued a credit for the jacket but failed to notice that I had reported the lack of socks in said package.
Oh…but this gets “better” (if you can call it that).
It seems that I had 3 months worth of charges as well as late fees and, for some reason, it appears they couldn’t seem to find out where to send the statements. If I wasn’t so anal about opening every bill I receive, I might have believed they’d tried to let me know there was a problem.
Haband had no problem sending what I had ordered, so an inability to send a bill to the right place seems to be a mystery.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that $1.97 had morphed into 7 times that amount in 3 months!
I called the bank. I’m ashamed to admit that in my frustration at the lack of cooperation by a robotic answer system, I kept slamming my finger on 0 trying to get customer service before screaming into the phone at a recording.
How did I get a live person? I finally pushed enough numbers and it relented (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)
After finally getting a live person on the line, I explained the problem. Bottom line: Haband had to issue a credit first.
So, I called Haband (after a major search for the card, and failed attempts to go onto the website). They looked into it and said they’d be happy to issue the $1.97 refund, but the Comenity bank had to retract the charges.
I just received an email from Comenity bank saying that I had an important message, so I went online and found THIS:
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3/17/2019 Haband Return Credit -$1.97
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3/13/2019 LATE FEE CREDIT Credit -$6.42
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3/13/2019 FINANCE CHARGE CREDIT Credit -$2.00
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3/09/2019 MINIMUM INTEREST CHARGE Charge $2.00
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3/09/2019 Account Assure (whatever that is) Charge $0.29
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3/04/2019 LATE FEE Charge $6.42
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2/06/2019 MINIMUM INTEREST CHARGE Charge $2.00
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2/06/2019 Account Assure Charge $0.12
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2/04/2019 LATE FEE Charge $2.15
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1/09/2019 Charge $0.04
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1/07/2019 Haband return Credit -$25.65 (the socks were 2.11 with tax)
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12/08/2018 Charge $27.76
When you subtract the ones with the minus signs, it leaves a $4.74 charge for socks I never received, and a black mark that never should have been on my credit rating.
Perhaps “Account Assure Charge” is some kind of code that means, “The credit card company will be assured it receives something.” Is it worth the bad publicity for them to hold my credit rating hostage until I pay them $4.74?
They need to be billing Haband.
But that would make sense.
wow, what a mess! I don’t believe they couldn’t figure out where to send a bill. I mean, they shipped you stuff! What did they do, shred your info as soon as they shipped your things?
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The credit card company processes the billing for them, so the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
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Looks like, if I am not mistaken, as this still makes little sense, your credit is shot and you can never buy anything with a loan, except from Haband!
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Not yet. I hadn’t made a purchase from them for a while — for the same reason I’m not buying from Blair any longer. The material is terrible, the fit is poor, and their products don’t. When I first started buying from them years ago, they had some great products.
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My goodness, what a convoluted story. I thought this sort of inefficiency only happened in Africa.
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This was just so in-your-face that I had to laugh. And you know, when I laugh at the ludicrious I have to share it. 😉
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What a bummer.
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And all this over a $1.97 charge that should have been taken off along with the charge for the coat.
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This is twisted thinking for you. And you cannot reason with them!
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I’m waiting for an answer to an email I sent asking them to take that charge off. If they say I have to pay it, I probably will, but I’ll cancel the card at the same time and never purchase anything from Haband again.
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If you said that in the email, it might have an affect on them
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Yep. That’s what I said. I received a message in my email today that said if I don’t pay the $4.74, there will be a late charge. So I went through the call system again (I think I have a few more grey hairs).
“April” was the cuss service rep, but by the impassioned way she talked, I think she was a more advance Artificial intelligence. She said that Haband would have to pay the $4.74. So when she asked if I wanted to pay the bill, I said something like this: “Bill — this is extortion.” So she says, “How will you be paying the bill.” It was like trying to catch a cat wearing a teflon suit.
I think I see another post about this in the immediate future. 🙂
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Oh, similar woes with the Gas Board when we changed suppler when moving here.
In short, I paid the amount due and they lost it. I reported it as lost, so they instigated a search. I spoke to someone else and it transpires they too instigated a search. Whoppee. They found my payment, TWICE, and put my account in credit issuing a cheque for a refund. I didn’t bother contacting them again and didn’t cash the cheque either as I knew they’d realise they’d made a mistake and ask me to send them a payment. I still have the cheque and haven’t heard anything since.
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Sometimes it’s best not to throw rocks at a sleeping dog, especially when no one is going to gain or lose.
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If they ask for payment in the future, we intend to send the uncashed cheque back!
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That’s a good reason to hold onto it. 🙂
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😀
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It’s inexcusable. Thanks for the tip. I’ll never order anything from Haband.
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Thanks. 🙂 If I saved one person from this 1st world nightmare, then writing about it was worth doing.
I’m going to have to write a post about why I ended up paying the $4.74 I didn’t owe. As I said, this whole thing doesn’t make sense. When I told the next generation AI (she was probably human but didn’t act that way) that I was closing my account, it was like listening to a computer say, “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and dial again…”
I found out the reason I wasn’t receiving paper bills (which I always open). Somewhere along the line, I must have missed unchecking a box and started receiving on-line statements. Since I can’t find any of those statements, I still have to wonder.
If it was $40, I might fight it on principle. But the aggrevation this has cost needs closure. Haband just lost a customer and I will NEVER get a card from comenity bank again.
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