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January 30, 2004

I am on the verge of cancelling my MBNA card. It seems they are absolutely determined to piss me off repeatedly and excessively. In addition to the previously mentioned browser problems with their payment system, I received a new error today when paying my bill.

We're sorry, you have exceeded your maximum number of payments for your billing cycle. Please try again later. If you need further assistance, please call 1-800-653-2465.

Are you fucking kidding me? Now I'm not even allowed to pay my bill. They must have figured locking out a bunch of browsers didn't irritate enough of their customers, so they decided to piss everyone else off by restricting how many times you can give them money.

So of course, I called them up to complain. Again. I explained that this was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard, and wanted some sort of reason as to why they would disallow payments. Their excuse? "Some people were abusing the system, so we implemented this enhancement." She even corrected herself by saying "well, I don't know that we can call that an enhancement." You're goddamned right you can't. What I can't figure out is how, exactly, one abuses an online payment system by making repeated payments. I also can't figure out why the entire system was re-engineered to punish everyone on account of a probably miniscule amount of alleged abusers when you can simply and easily terminate the abusers' access to online banking.

I don't buy that excuse anyway. People "abusing" the payment system? Poppycock. It's more likely and plausable that the number of payments have been restricted to A) cut down on transactions, and maybe B) give the balance more time to accumulate interest.

As I've stated before, their old online system was great; it worked perfectly and consistently. Unfortunately, it seems someone in MBNA's management said "Let's get our online system reworked, with an emphasis on suck." Now we have this clunky, broken, outsourced piece of shit payment system courtesy of CheckFree.

Conveniently, MBNA has no formal complaint procedure for their online services, so I'm going to probably skip the press release and go straight to writing their corporate headquarters with a long and detailed rant about their online payment system and why it's a pile of crap, under a cover sheet simply stating "WTF" in about 80 point type.

(07:22)

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Comment #1 by dattaway

Same happened to me. Tried compiling the latest mozilla from cvs. Bastards. Booted a knoppix disk, and it got past! Then it came up with that error. So I did a google and found your site. Seems someone working at MBNA is lazy and found a good way to shift the burden and blame: the customer. And gag the telephone support into helping.

I cancelled my FirstUSA card, because they started telemarketing me. MBNA has great customer service and fraud prevention, but something happened on their internet side.

Its interesting to see how companies rise and fall. Its tragic to see a good one have employees lose their jobs because a few got lazy and drove the customers away. We live in fast times.

(02-FEB-04 - 17:25 EST)

Comment #2 by Accipiter

Well I wrote MBNA my letter today, so we'll see what happens. I doubt it will make any difference, but I guess it's worth a shot.

The blame, however, is squarely on MBNA and CheckFree. I miss MBNA's old system. They outsourced it to CheckFree when it was working just fine, and CheckFree came in and made everything suck. It's unfortunate, too, because as you say, employees probably lost their jobs. And now their system is crappier because of it.

Mozilla has no problem accessing the account summaries and such, but go to pay your bill and that's where the problems lie.

(02-FEB-04 - 21:03 EST)

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