Credit card czar

Don McNay

“When all your promises are gone

I’m the only one”

— Melissa Etheridge



I recently wrote about an MBNA collector who claimed to have talked to my mother on June 21, even though she had died on April 2.

You can see the collector’s letter and mom’s death certificate on DonMcNay.com

Since that column, I’ve found that MBNA is not the only credit card company communicating with the dead. I’ve heard several collection stories worse than mine.

If you want to get rich, handing out credit cards is a good business to be in. Randy Lerner, the former chairman of MBNA, is a billionaire who owns the Cleveland Browns football team and is looking to buy an English soccer club. He sold MBNA to Bank of America for a pot load of money.

After he hit a billion, you’d think he would leave my dead mother alone.

I can understand trying to collect from people who owe you. I have a professional associate who owes me money and I have tried for 20 months to collect. If I have to, I will try for another 20.

It’s different when you try to collect from people who don’t owe you. Fred Williams pointed out in the Buffalo News that 42 percent of complaints made to the Federal Trade Commission say that collectors have gone after the wrong person or demanded extra money.

That doesn’t even count the post-mortem collections from people like mom.

I decided to file a complaint against MBNA. The problem is that there is not really a place where I can complain. I sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission, the Comptroller of the Currency, various state attorney generals, and various state consumer protection agencies.

I am not even sure who I am complaining about. MBNA turned the alleged debt (I’m still waiting for proof) over to Mann Bracken in Atlanta and later to True Logic in Colorado. I assume that I am complaining about MBNA, but regulators may be focused on Mann Bracken or True Logic instead.

I’ve spent my life in the financial services industry. If I can’t figure out where to complain, I can’t imagine how a blue-collar worker could get to the right place.

We need a credit card czar.

Consumers need one agency, one address and one phone number to call about abusive credit card companies and collectors.

That credit card czar should have some real authority. Few of the above mentioned agencies have any power. The Web site for the Federal Trade Commission basically tells you not to expect their help and the Comptroller of the Currency is usually an industry lapdog. State agencies don’t have the resources to go after billion-dollar credit card companies.

You can see why the former MBNA chair can afford to buy sports teams.

The credit card industry has some of the best lobbyists in the world. They pushed through the so-called “bankruptcy reform” last year, which was essentially a welfare program for credit card companies. Not that credit card companies needed any more help from Congress. Things already were slanted in their favor.

Right now is a wonderful time to be a collector. Laws are rarely enforced and fines are low.

A credit card czar would keep the abuses in check. A czar could issue a license to be a collector. Anyone that goes over the line could be thrown out of the collection business.

Even without a credit card czar, there are some ways to reign in abuses.

One place to look would be state bar associations.

A trend in law firms nowadays is to have few lawyers on staff, but an army of collectors who operate under their umbrella.

To me, the solution is simple. If a “law firm” cannot manage or supervise its staff, the partners in the firm should be disbarred. If that happened a couple of times, collectors would not go over the line as often as they do now.

At the very least, they would stop saying they have talked to dead people.

When all of the promises are gone, the czar would be the one who stops out-of-control collectors.

Don McNay is chairman of the board at McNay Settlement Group, where no one is out of control. You can write to him at don@donmcnay.com or read other things he has written at www.donmcnay.com. His award-winning column is syndicated on the CNHI News Service and he is on the board of directors for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

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