Marathon Man

Lol its why i try to pay with a cc but this place dont take em so i cant go there

Nottafatslob

I don't know I got a call from Chase and it sent a shiver up my spine even though I have 2 fused vertebrae and a torn disk it was a real shiver.
This is not smoke screen stuff but serious and I will be glad to share with all interested. At first I thought pain in the ... call about my Ink card but it wasn't. It was about a United card and I was asked about all the cash advances. I said I NEVER did one and then it was explained to me that the AP charges and the WF PP charges and one to a CU two months ago all are coded as CA's to them even though it shows online on my statement as a purchase or sale.

I admit I was startled and not sure what to say so what came out was that I was buying gift cards for incentives for employees and the WF is a PP like for kids. I actually got told they would note the account and told NOT TO DO IT.
Can you imagine but I was told to do this to avoid account shutdown.
Their words not mine. So I looked back 4 months and 2 WF each month and 3-6 AP each month and one CU payment one time and another CU one time two months apart. Please no PM's on what abbreviations are LOL

nwflyboy

Hmm. So unbeknownst to you, Chase was really coding a bunch of activities as cash advances, but those appeared to you as purchases?

caGALINDO

AlohaDaveKennedy

Yep, sounds like my kinda guys all right. Cardinal Fang is know to be allergic to cash advances and substantial gift card purchases. Banks receive codes, but they can also recode transactions. Were the transaction all nice, round, repetitive amounts?

gloreglabert

And did you have real spend mixed in with the games?

QL_714

You are going to need a new name for this Cardinal. It was received as a CA and this Cardinal recoded it as a purchase. Now please leave one of my favorite banks alone!

brooklynmatt

No my question was what happens if you buy them online that ships from an office somewhere... Your credit card gets debited but the get lost in the mail.

What recourse is there if the online office has no phone number or address?

Marathon Man

Interesting... Over at the WF thread I had moaned and groaned about how WF held up my funds on a card for several weeks and could not even release the money if they tried until I took the matter to WF corporate (and it ended up being their mistake that they admitted, so they promptly sent the funds to me by Fed X) But at one point I felt compelled to dispute the transaction with my Chase UA card.

When I had contacted Chase --and doing this was a last resort but one wants his $1,100 back--I had said I used the CC to buy a prepaid card product. The rep said he had no issue with that at all, and he even said to me in so many words: 'Yes I've come to find that people do that sometimes even if they have actual credit cards so they can use the prepaid for small things and not allow others to get too close to their deeper debit or credit accounts...' (ie, if I have a prepaid that only has say $200 on it, then that's all some slime ball can take from me if I use it at slimeball.com for something). I was like, uh huh, that's it... yeah.

Anyway, my Chase UA rep made no mention of cash advances and I said, "Do you see the purchase of XXX for $$$ on YY date?" And he said yes to that-- a purchase.

I will say that it was mentioned way back in another call to Chase that WF appears to need some sort of window of CA availability in order to allow a transaction to go through that later is in fact coded as a purchase, but all of mine were purchases at all times--from the moment they went through, according to everything this rep had been able to see. Back when I started doing WF I found I needed to have at least the $2500 CA availability in order to even do the loads, and to do that, one's CC limit must be high. I had a lower limit (since making room for other Chase cards I had applied for) and was told that the CA limit is a % of or a factor of one's CR limit. So by raising it to say, $14k or something, my CA limit was now just over $2500. Then I could load WFs, which can be loaded at that max. It was strange to all involved that WF would and could have a need to utilize one's CA world in order to get the product approved, but that's how it went.

I had seen something like this YEARS ago with AAA when they had a product called Visa travel money or something like that. See at the bottom of this post if you are interested in reading this bit...

Anyway, once WF paid me out and the matter with them was over, I later contacted Chase telling them I was not filing the dispute (I had loaded the WF with $2500 and was disputing for $1100) because the company gave me my money back. I had received the Chase transaction dispute paperwork but just stuffed it in my WF closed folder as unused, and that was that.

So far my UA Chase Visa is fine. I have gone on to use it heavily on other things because of a targeted post card offer double miles gig I registered for (that came out right around the time of those defunct offers for XX miles if you spend $$$ that the blogs all talked about but turned out to be for other countries) and that promo goes through the end of Nov for me. So I covet my Chase too.

*******

Visa travel Money ~2004 AD:

And he came unto them from high up on the mountain and he spaketh... "In those days, there had been many a GC and PP that required no fee to load or no more than one shekel. For I have seen the Charter One and the National City... The Texas State Bank and ye olde Visa Buxx... and it was like the Golden Calf..." And the people, they did whale and the did sway, and many a mile were had by all as they dranketh of the challis and feasted upon the boar...

Ehem... um, yes, anyway, I had bought many GCs on my Citi Cards long ago because you could set the CA limit to $0 and if you got that in writing that you did that, nothing could code as a CA. Some FTers will argue that they can still get around this, but I had been successful in fighting the matter when such a thing happened to me...

I had not set my CA to $0, but rather, to $100. I was loading products for say $5,000 and if they went through as a CA, they would not go through. Period. But if they went as a purchase, they would go through. And some, if they had WANTED to go through as a CA, they would have to switch to a purchase and so I would win. Today it works a bit like this, but I think it cant really switch for you anymore.

Well, Visa travel money was to be loaded as a $5,000 purchase and I was told by rep #11111 from AAA that this would be the case. But when it went thru as a CA, I got nailed. So I contacted AAA and Citi on this matter and after many days of Marathon moans, I eventually found out that AAA had snuck in the thing as a CA... and they were actually able to do it because: I had a $100 window, and so they could make some little authorization like gas stations do for say $1. And once THAT went through, the glass was effectively broken and they could swoop in the whole thing! But because all parties were accounted for, I got Citi to get it reversed.

The Citi manager was pissed off--not at me, at AAA! She cussed that they were a sham and she had seen this sort of thing before. She actually said this. I wish I could have recorded it. She promptly adjusted my citicard account and apologized for this. She then said I should set my CA lim to absolute $0 not a penny more, if that's what I wanted to do. She suggested I do not buy AAA products with a CC and she did tell me that this could have ended up looking bad for me (aside from the fees) because of the way it is reported internally. I had no idea what she meant by that but I remember it. But this was back in like 2004 so things were different then. They all weren't so über 'security reasons/fraud' on us back then as they seem to be now.

Citi rep angry bird lady told me it appeared almost illegal in terms of the way merchants code with CCs as to how AAA was able to mess with the CA vs CR world. Similarly, I would imagine WF is doing something fishy, but guess who ends up paying the price? Yup, the recipient/user!

Marathon Man

I would say: Welcome to my world, breaux.
You need to follow the paper trail you hopefully have and then spend about as much time and money futzin with the blokes who messed you up as the miles you hoped to have gained would have been worth and get er done in full. Once it's over, chalk it up as a learning experience and go onto the next thing. But do get moving on it and good luck!

AlohaDaveKennedy

Oh for the Life of Brian (Thomas Moynihan)! I got the red inquisition outfit on and I'm holding a pack of matches. Can't a Cardinal have a little fun with an evil bank tied to the stake?

BTW, we are going to have to reprogram that Cardinal you found - we don't help customers, we flog them.

mikeef

Dude, MM considers that a perk, not a FAR!

Mike

Marathon Man

indeed I do... AND I wanna know how many can I have before the fraud department shuts me down because I hit some unseen limits?

Marathon Man

I mean... imagine being outed by so many cardinals that a set of double secret über cardinals outs THEM over you?

Marathon Man

the DSüCs ("Double Secret über cardinals," or DUCS or DUCKS or QUACKS) as we could call them, don't 'shut you down' from deals anymore... No, what they do now is try and wear you out so you don't WANT to do business with the company with which you are having issues!

They hold funds, make some sort of internal glitch, pass the call to people who say, "Yes, I'm Sarah and I'm the only one here," and then when you call back everyone's name is Sarah... or they institute protocol that you have to ride through some pipeline of in order to get to the other side weeks and weeks from now just to get your money back... and they make you tell yourself, "Never again will I get involved with that thing!!!"

That is the tactic. It works in some companies too--to make a person work, say, all the bad shifts so they decide to quit on their own, instead of having to let them go.