I have a credit card with Chase. One day looking at my bill I noticed a charge for $8 from Chase Fraud Detector. Easy to notice because I had few other charges. That pissed me off, but I continued opening my mail. I had a letter from the Chase Fraud Detector department notifying me of the service I "signed up" for. Hmm....I don't remember signing up for that. Actually, I explicitly remember declining the service when some pushy telemarketer called me twice to sign up for that service a couple weeks earlier. I called up the fraud detector department to complain about fraud from their own department. The Fraud Detector department wasn't too interested in researching fraud originating from their department caused by a sleazy telemarketer working on commission. I was barely able to get them to promise to remove their fraudulent charge from my account. After I was done with the fraud detector department I called the normal number to report a fraudulent charge on my card. Once again Chase wasn't too interested in researching fraud on their part. Besides being from them it was below a certain dollar amount meaning there is no investigation at all. So kids, remember when stealing money from people just charge a couple bucks to a couple thousand accounts and it's all good.

My favorite reason for hating credit card companies comes from when I had my own merchant account. One day my merchant account was hacked into (on the credit card gateway company's side) and someone made dozens of one cent charges using my account (before it was frozen) to verify if their list of stolen credit cards were still active. See I got that one cent, but the criminal got to know if the card was valid or not. About 1 in 3 charges went through. Well when I discovered this I called up the gateway company and reversed those one cent charges. What's great is I got charged 35 cents for each attempt to verify a card and they wouldn't refund that money. Okay that pissed me off but this is where the evil comes in. I asked if they could contact the people whose cards were stolen. Nope, that wasn't any of their concern, or the credit card company's concern. Now that is customer service.

July ? 2005                   A Letter from The Blank Factory

Some time ago my finacee's computer got infected with all sorts of horrible spyware. Obviously it was her fault for going to those sleazy wedding invitation sites. It took me two days to fully clean all the crap out. Normally I can clean off spyware in no time at all, but this crap was evil and robust. It had processes all over the place which kept copying and renaming themselves. Even with a registry monitor they kept setting themselves to run at startup and couldn't be totally removed in safe mode because there were also corrupted windows files. What finally allowed me to kill those malicious programs was to rename the running evil executables and then copy my own executable over those files. I made a windows application which just returned from WinMain() immediately so when it ran it wasn't noticed at all. Once I copied my blank executable over the evil executables everything was okay because the evil couldn't be respawned.

Oh yeah, here's the best part about the malicious spyware/adware. It popped up advertisements to "legitimate" companies alongside the usual porn and gambling ads. I noticed ads from a major credit card company and a major chain restaurant whose name ends with "Factory" so I emailed them this: "I'm writing to complain about your marketing techniques. Over the weekend my fiancee's computer was hijacked by spyware and she began to get pop-ups from sleazy online gambling and porn sites....oh and from you. I do not appreciate that you paid an "advertising" company to essentially break my fiancee's computer. I wasted an entire weekend fixing the problems which you are partially responsible for because you chose to turn a blind eye to your "advertising" partner's business ethics. I would of found a flyer rubber banded to a brick and thrown through my window less offensive and costly than to have a computer hijacked. Because of this I do not plan on patronizing your business anymore."

A couple days later I got a response from "The Factory". It sounds like they passed it to their legal department because they thought I might sue them. I would post that response but it's "confidential". Basically they just say they can't be held responsible for the actions of their advertisers. Yes, just look the other way. You have no power over what companies you contract for services.

Download Demo (820KB)