Complaint Review: Providian National Bank - Tilton New Hampshire

A few years back, I had excellent credit and a multitude of credit cards. I bought the credit protection for each card I had in order to maintain my good credit rating.

At the time I was self-employed. When the manufacturer for the products I was reselling stopped producing the product, I began to have money shortages.

I called each credit company in order to invoke my credit protection. They asked me if I was laid off from work. I told them I was self-employed and having a temporary cash-flow problem. They said that if you are self-employed, you can only use the credit protection if you CLOSE YOUR BUSINESS FOR GOOD. I said that my business was my only source of income, and closing it would preclude ANY income EVER. They said that if I didn't close my business, I could not use my credit protection that I had been paying for for years...

Sometimes reading the fine print doesn't even help! NEVER AGAIN!

After a call from a representative of Providian regarding insurance, to which I replied "NO", I found that after a few months they had been charging me for insurance. This came to a total of about $63.00 (give or take some). They did right the problem after a phone call but it's aa phone call I shouldn't have had to make. In response to Mr. Providian N.H., "If you can't learn from your mistakes... stop making them!".

Thanks for the great website!

If a phone call fixes the mistake, then how come the 9.9% interest rate I'm supposed to be charged is still 18.99%, after 10 months and a phone call every month, not to mention a couple of emails and a letter? You call 'em, they have to put you through to somebody else, who puts you through to somebody else, who puts you through to somebody else, who will have to get somebody else to call you back. GOOD LUCK, because somebody else who is supposed to call you back does not exist!!

I was so shocked when I became a verifier of sales. I could not even belief the number of calls I heard that customers had stated NO to the sale, but the rep still sold the product to them and the acct charged.

For a sale to be complete the customer must say "YES". If they say "OK", the sales rep has to ask "IS THAT A YES?" But that rarely happened. In a whole days work of listening to calls....I might of heard 4 or 5 yes's, but most were hmmmms, or ya, or I don't know's, but rarley a yes.

The other sad things were the customers that did not understand or speak english very well. I'm so sure there are thousands upon thousands of customers that have paid for a membership product they never knew anything about.

I work for Providian. If you think deceptive trade practices are bad you should hear what they say about consumers behind closed doors. Calling their clients "no good negro trash" and "a box of wanna be crackers".

Providian is a pretty trashy company. I've worked for them for two years now. We are trained to be harrassing and such to our customers. We monitor peoples accounts and purposely add ficticious charges and then argue with the customer when they call and complain.

More to come later.
Don't buy into the Providian hype.

First of all, If you found the mistake and they took it off, why worry about it now??? It is your responsibility to look at your own bill when you get it!!!, there is even a disclaimer that says if any errors are found to call and they would fix it, they did!!! second they took the charges off your account everything is ok now, I see you only got 3-4 calls total, and they fixed it for you, no more calls! They made a mistake. We make mistakes!!, not everybody is perfect, we are all human.It is understandable why it would upset you, but now you are abusing that by going all sue-happy and asking other people to join you in a lawsuit against them! for a mistake? please!, $18.75 ?? if they hadn't taken the charges off, then yes, consider legal help. But after they apologize and fix everything, now you have to sue!??, THAT IS UNETHICAL! it just shows how greedy people just love to take advantage of situations like that in order to get a fast buck!

Oh and by the way? The thing about Credit card insurance being worthless, because you are still liable for $50.00 on your card?????? , that just proves how much you actually thought this through, and how you didn't even gather any information to support that statement.

That is not what insurance is, you are actually talking about Credit Protection, which is the only kind of "insurance" credit cards offer, if you have CP, and you lose your job, become ill for a long period of time, lose over 25% of your income, become disabled, suffer a death in your family, or a natural disaster that affects your area, If you have it in your account, you can activate it, and it will freeze all interest on your account, and will not require you to make any payments until your situation improves, and will leave you to use your card with whatever remaining balance you have, for up to 24 months. Actually being in the collections department, almost all of the people I talk to, that have screwed up credit, something happened to them, and they have no CP, just like you, they refused to get it at some point in time, and now they are royally screwed, they get laid off, someone dies, or something happened, and there is nothing we could do about it, b/c they had an offer to protect themselves and they did not take it, so they have to pay for it.

So you better pray nothing like this happens to you, because you will regret not gettting it for a very long time.

I hope plenty of people read this enough to understand how things really work, not just how one person who thinks they got shafted thinks they do.

And I am not doing this to upset you, but think things twice before you threaten to take action for something simple that was blown WAY out of proportion.