Finances & Money

Enrique and the Bank of America / MBNA Runaround

I had 2 MBNA credit cards before Bank of America bought them out last year (a Visa and a Mastercard). I can see the Mastercard on my Bank of America online account now, and I got a Bank of America-branded MC card last month. However, I never got the Visa, and I can’t see it online, sort of. It’s there, but not really there.

Anyway, I called today to do a balance transfer, and while I had the account manager on the phone, asked why I couldn’t see the Visa. Turns out the account didn’t have my SSN attached to it, so it was an semi-orphaned account. After a few security questions, she added my SSN to the account. I asked when it would show up online, and she said she handled one of these yesterday and it was instantaneous. However, it wasn’t showing up for me. She gave me the online support number, and we finished up my balance transfer (I’ll talk more about that in a different post).

So I called Online Support about 4 hours later and got Enrique on the phone. I told him the problem, and he proceeded to get every last piece of data about my life, and my cards, until I my brain had shriveled from all the questions. And then he asked one more.

Enrique: “For the card ending in XXXX, what was your last payment amount?”

Me:  “I don’t know. I have $XX.XX in Quicken, so I’ll go with that.”

Enrique: “Please call back when you have the information please”

Me: “But I just told you the information”

Enrique: “Please call back when you have the information please”

Me: “What information? What did I say wrong? Was it something I said? Why don’t you love me anymore!?!?”

Enrique: “I do love you, but in a Bank to Client sort of way. Please call back when you have the information please”

Me: “Dear goodness, please stop it! Stop reading from a script! What did I say wrong? I can’t call back with correct information when as far as I know I told you all the right stuff!”

Enrique: “For your protection, we must ask general account information questions. Please call back…blah blah blah”

We did this about 3 more times, then I asked for a manager. He left to get the manager, and about 30 seconds later a young-sounding woman answered. Turns out she was on the call the whole time. She informed me that the Visa account did not have my SSN attached, so I had absolutely no way of passing the millions of questions they asked (I’m paraphrasing here).

So in the end, it turns out that the account manager from the initial call was mistaken in that the SSN changes was immediate. I’ll have to call back tomorrow to get them to manually link the accounts. All I hope is that I don’t get Enrique again.

But I hope he still loves me, in the Bank – Client sort of way.