I’m beginning to believe that bankers have supplanted ambulance-chasing lawyers as the slimiest sharkskin-suit-wearing industry in the country.  Actually, they may be in a tie with health insurers (see my post about that), but right now I’m thinking the bankers are in the lead.

Here’s what has my dander up today: When we got back from San Francisco we had a message from Chase saying we’re late on our last car payment.  This confused Celeste because we’ve been paying with autodrafts from our bank account for four years, or the entire lifespan of the car loan.  When she called Chase back they said that if we’d read the fine print of our loan we would have known that they don’t accept autodrafts for the last payment.  Okay, fine.  So Celeste asks the very unfriendly bank rep why we’re hearing about this only now that the payment is 90 days late and we’ve been put in collections?  The rep’s reply is that she can only handle payment, not answer customer service questions.

It gets better.  Celeste asks how much we owe.  The rep says she needs our bank information before she can answer any questions.  Huh?  After Celeste asks again the woman gives her the amount and they take care of the payment information, which by the way requires a $15 processing fee.  Huh?  (Celeste truly has a knack for getting the asshole reps).

Before she gets off the phone with the bank’s collection-dolt Celeste gets a customer service number, calls it and enters into banker-logic zone. The customer service rep asks her for our address to verify that he’s talking to the right person.  When she gives him the address he says that it is the wrong address.  Bingo, they never got our change of address when we moved two years ago, which probably explains why we didn’t get a late notice on the final payment.  Yet they were able to track us down for collection purposes.  Nice.  Eventually he’s able to confirm Celeste’s identity using other information and Celeste, who is absolutely fanatical about protecting our credit score, asks how we can get this cleared off our records.  After all we’ve never been late on a payment for the entire lifetime of the loan, and obviously there was a mix up with our change of address.  His answer was to give her a fax number to send a letter to and then wait seven days for their verdict.  Huh?

Here’s my problem.  The bank is probably within their rights, technically, to treat us like this but in the real world they are behaving reprehensibly.  We’d obviously been good customers for four years, but they’re treating us like criminals because of an honest mix up?  And who’s to say it’s our fault?  If they could track us down for collection couldn’t they have done the same for a courtesy call reminding us that an autodraft wouldn’t be accepted for our final payment?  Assholes. 

We’re not the only ones feeling this way about the banks.  Greensboro blogger David Hoggard has some thoughts about banks (he compares them unfavorably with payday lenders) and there’s a very good Frontline piece on the credit card industry that is enlightening to say the least.   It’s not just the credit card side of the industry that’s sullying its reputation; let’s not forget the banks’ investment branches involvement in the dotcom debacle.  With the loosening regulation of financial institutions I think things might get worse before they get better and ironically I think our best hope is, gag, the lawyers.  Hopefully we’ll get some class-action cases going that will have the bankers begging for re-regulation from that den of thieves otherwise known as Congress.

Oh, good Lord.