text: Beware of Companies That Won't Provide Written Confirmation
  Beware of Credit One Bank and Other Companies That Won't Provide Written confirmation of Their Claim
  Last year, my wife received a credit card offer from what she thought was Capitol One. Since she received several of these offers a year, she did not look at the card carefully and agreed to accept the card. The card itself had a logo that was virtually similar to Capitol One's logo and we had previously had Capitol One cards. She later realized that it was not Capitol One but a company called Credit One. Nonetheless, she thought it doesn't hurt to have another backup card that would only be used in emergencies. With that in mind, she added my name as an authorized user and forgot about the card. That is, until recently, when we started receiving a barrage of phone calls from Credit One.
  Each caller had a thick, foreign accent and, was obviously reading from a script. The callers were hesitant to provide me their names when I asked. I later found out why. The callers were told me they were trying to collect on a past due balance on the Credit One card. We were told that we owed two years of their annual fee of $8.00 each year, a $19.00 fee for adding me as an authorized user and a late charge for not paying the authorized user fee. Needless to say, this all came as a surprise to us.
  The caller's script would start telling me what was due and informing me that the caller "needed" for me to pay the bill by debit card today or that more charges will be added to the bill" (paraphrased). I asked each caller to send me an itemized statement or bill along with the contract that obligates my wife to pay the above charges. Each time I asked, the caller became stupefied, as this request seemed to require a deviation from their script. One caller insisted that I speak to her supervisor. I agreed but all I got in return was an argumentative, demeaning response which led me to say a few choice words before hanging up. Another caller, also flummoxed by my simple request, tried to get me to speak with his supervisor. This prompted me to ask the caller his name. He told me it was Jack Scott. After I spent ten seconds laughing about this, I spoke with the supervisor, who, upon my request, identified himself as Daniel Martin. I asked him to spell his name and, to his credit, he did so correctly. Quite frankly, I don't think I could find two people, in our country, who work so closely together with such classic Anglo-American sounding names. I'm surprised he didn't tell me his name was George Bush or Bill Clinton.
  It is incredulous that some numbskull, whom I don't know, with some trumped up name, would call our home and expect that we would just give out our debit card information and pay money that we don't owe to people we don't know especially, when they admitted to be calling from overseas. With all of the pervasive, telephone scams that exist, there is no reason to ever provide personal information or money to anyone, unless you absolutely know who they are, that you are sure you owe the money and you owe it to them and you initiated the phone call. Quite frankly, I prefer to handle business matters the old fashioned way. Just send me a bill, an explanation of the charges and, if I don't agree with the bill, a place to call where some intelligence actually exits. Credit One does not have that and, therefore, this bill will not be paid unless and until it meets my "needs".