My Thought Pot

Today I decided to replace my CapitalOne credit card with my new Amazon.com Visa (Chase) card for all my day to day spendings due to various benefits. I did not cancel the CapitalOne credit card as it might bring down my credit score. So decided to just stop using and moving all my automatic bill payments to my new card. I decided to stop CreditInform service (a credit-theft protection service provided by CapitalOne) which I was wanting to discontinue long back. But I tell you, cancelling this was real harrasing.

I did some googling and found that lot of people have trouble discontinuing CreditInform.

• http://tinyurl.com/56hcuc
• http://tinyurl.com/5dk57w

So I called up CreditInform contact-us (1-866-226-3745) to discontinue the service. To my surprise I had to answer a lot more questions to verify my authenticity to cancel a CreditInform than to get a credit card. They asked me the following

1. Complete SSN
2. Date of Birth
3. First and Last Name
4. Current Mailing Address
5. Current and Previous Phone number
6. Account numbers of 2 accounts (other than CapitalOne) monitored by CreditInform

It was scary and I am not sure if it is required for me to answer all these stuff to an operator. With the above information I am sure there can be an Identity Theft. She was about to ask more questions but I thought this was enough and started asking her the reason why I was asked this much information just for canceling. She kept on pestering me that its for complete verification of my account. But I still cannot understand what other information is required for verification to just cancel a CreditInform service. I believe this is just to discourage and harass customers from canceling the account. Truely I was foolish in the first place to signup for that service when it was free for first 3 months and was billed $9 for this never used feature since 2 years. A classic trap of introductory offers. But I could never believe that it will be so tough to cancel a service especially when they mention that cancelling the service is very easy. Atlast I was able to hear from her after a lot of special offers that the service is discontinued for me. I still doubt that this is taken care of completely as other users in the forums mentioned that their cards are still charged for CreditInform and they had to cancel the credit card to stop it.

So if you are doing the same make sure to take a note of

1. Confirmation Number
2. Operator’s Name
3. Date of cancellation

for your records and make sure that the service is actually cancelled and not charged in the next billing periods (which I still need to monitor)

I strongly discourage any others out there who are using CapitalOne credit card to not fall in this trap. This is just a rip-off and they constantly rob your account month after month and you will not notice. And when you notice and want to get rid off it you are hassled. CapitalOne is a big NO NO for me in future.

money