American Express

American Express

American Express

American Express

Consumer Relations

777 American Express Way

Fort Lauderdale, FL 33337

Attention: Michelle Gethers-Clark

On August 11th 2004, my daughter called American Express regarding her past due balance on the "authorized user's" card on her account. Due to a family emergency, the person who was on her account as an authorized user had not paid the balance on time. This was my daughter's first American Express card and she wasn't sure what to do so she called American Express and their representative assured her that no adverse credit/collection activity would result and that it would be "ok" for her to pay the balance in full when she received her next paycheck which was about a week in the future.

When she called American Express about a week later to make the phone payment, she was surprised to see that her account was closed and the balance of around $260.00 was already sent to a collection service, Risk Management.

Upon calling Risk Management, they were very hostile to her and even rude. They insisted that the account was sent to them for collection on August 11th, the same day that my daughter had called to make a promise to pay. They insisted that any and all payments needed to be sent directly to them as American Express was no longer handling the account. And they said that any payments made that day would take over 3 weeks to post and that there may be additional fees.

After that phone call, we called American Express to complain and were told we could make the payment in full over the phone to American Express (my daughter was told that was not possible). Because my daughter had just deposited her paycheck in her account and the funds may still be on hold, we decided to use our personal checking account for the payment instead. So we gave American Express our checking number and routing number for the payment and we got a confirmation number and paid the balance in full.

The next day, American Express initiated an ACH debit in the exact same amount from my daughter's bank account which she had never given them. We do not know how this happened. American Express refused to accept responsibility even though their representative confirmed by phone that the payment had been made using our checking account and not my daughter's. My daughter continued to get overdraft charges to her account. American Express was not the least bit helpful in getting the issue resolved. Their excuse was that the account was no longer open so they had no responsibility for it.

The reason I was happy to make the payment in full on my daughter's account was because we had decided several weeks earlier not to ever do business with American Express again due to a separate issue related to our account. We have been card holders since 1979 and have always paid our account in full. This year, we decided not to use credit cards except for travel and one month there were very few charges on the Amex card (as opposed to the usual 3-4K).

We were shocked to find that the following month, American Express put a block on our account and refused to allow us to spend more than a few hundred dollars due to "our spending habits" had changed. We called American Express (their customer service representatives are in India )and they insisted that we needed to provide them with all kinds of banking information and financial statements in order to have the card unblocked. We were not comfortable giving such personal information to an office located in India and we told them to forget about it. We said we would respond to a written request but they never sent anything in the mail.

So anyway, we just decided not to use their card anymore and definitely after the recent experience my daughter had we strongly advise anyone to think twice before doing business with this company which clearly has significant failures when it comes to communication, service, and processing payments. Also, it appears that the ethics of the company have changed and they no longer seem to value customer loyalty.

Thank you,

Dr. & Mrs. R.C.

Carlsbad, CA

Linda C Click this link to e-mail the above consumer: //