First USA

Unfortunately interest rate increases are not something you can 'dispute'. You can either accept them and go on using your account, or you can reject them and close your account and pay off the account under the older terms.

On 'fixed rate' accounts, the creditor need only give you 15 days notice. Usually this is done by means of a bill stuffer in microscopic print nestled in among the offers for worthless services and cheap junk that are crammed into your credit card bill. It is the creditors hope that you will discard this with the rest of the junk and never actually read it.

In order to 'reject' the new terms, you must write them a letter stating so and mail it to them so it is received by the date specified in the notice. I suspect that this is what happened to you.

I recently had this same go-round with FirstUSA and I resolved it by requesting that the account be closed and the CSR transferred me to a 'retention specialist' who I allowed to 'convince' me to keep the account if they agreed to put the interest rate back to 9.9%.

Nevertheless I requested the specific reasons for the change in terms as they specifically said in their notice is was based on "information received from a credit reporting agency." The explanation was laughable. It was merely some plain text of FICO Explanation Codes spit out onto the paper. Among them was 'many past delinquencies'. None of my credit reports have any delinquencies on them whatsoever. I wrote them back and asked them to identify the specific delinquencies for me. In response I got back another virtually identical letter where they had replaced the delinquency 'reason' with 'too few current accounts'. Since I have 14 open trade lines that are all current and 28 "Paid as agreed" account, including several installement loans and a mortgage I'm going to ask them "What is a sufficient number of 'current' accounts to not be considered 'too few'?" I'm comfortable certain I'm going to get some specious piece of nonsense back from them.

Basically FirstUSA's customer service is a complete joke and they haven't a clue what they are doing. They send me convenience checks for the 3 different accounts I have with them all with different terms and then 3 weeks later another three sets of checks come with some other kind of different deals. I got one set for 9.9% for the life of the balance (subject to minimum payment provisions) and then a week later 9.9% with fixed payments over 48 months against my credit line.

Everytime I have tried to call them, the CSR who took the call couldn't help me at all as my request was not suitable to one of their 'prepared script' responses they read (rather badly) directly off of their computer screen. After failing to help me they then have the audacity to try and sell me some worthless service like credit life insurance or a vacation club. I find the only practical (and least aggravating) way to deal with them is to write letters.

So I'm really not surprised that you have not gotten any assistance whatsoever from them.

 

First USA is arguably the CCB of Prime cards and in my opinion one you are better off without, the sooner the better.

Check out this url http://members.tripod.com/FUSA1/
one of many sites detailing the multitude of horrors and sins of this most corrupt bank. I believe you will find your answers there.