I got my latest credit card statement the other day, and on it was a credit in the amount of $159 or so from bestbuy.com. (Background on the Xbox saga.) The credit card company had already negated the charge when I discovered it, because it was fraudulent, but apparently when I brought the (attempted-stolen-by-world’s-dumbest-criminal) goods back to Best Buy, they processed it as any other return, which credited the purchase price to my old (cancelled by then) account, which somehow followed me to the new account. (Don’t you love neverending streams of comma-delimited sentence fragments?)
Executive summary: I’ve been billed for the bogus Xbox once and credited for the bogus charge twice. As in, free $159 in my pocket.
So this morning I called up the credit card company to report the error (because I’m stupid…or at least not crooked…but mainly stupid), and this is what they said:
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do about that. You’ll have to call Best Buy and talk to them about getting the extra credit removed.”
WTF? They credited my account, from the Wells Fargo “credit cards accounts are ridiculously easy to steal, but it’s cheaper to eat the fraud losses and issue new cards than fix the system” fund, but can’t un-credit it. I’m a big fan of the whole honesty thing, but if they’re going to make it that difficult, maybe I’ll just keep it then…
Leave a Reply