This web page details our opinions of and experiences with:
AccountCentralOnline Sucks (and here's why)
This is yet another miserable, backwoods HSBC Corporation (WHOIS DATA)
Customer Comments / Complaints
This page documents our experiences with "AccountCentralOnline".
Newest instances and problems are appended to the END of this page.
General Customer Service Numbers
To reach General Customer Service Information, please call the appopriate number:
MasterCard or Visa Card 1-800-379-7999 Discover® Network Card 1-888-333-2201 American Express® Card issued by HSBC 1-866-300-0335 To reach technical support please call 1-877-737-9705 Monday through Saturday between 8AM - Midnight ET. TDD card members, please call 1-877-902-0967 AccountCentral@us.hsbc.com
If you live in CT, DC, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VA, VT, WV, AA, Foreign Country
Payment Address:
Standard Mail:
Payment Center
PO Box 17313
Baltimore, MD 21297-1313
Overnight Mail:
Payment Center
1352 Charwood Road
Hanover, MD 21076---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you live in AL, AR, FL, GA, IA, IN, KY, LA, MI, MN, MS, MO, NC, ND, OH, SC, SD, TN, WI
Payment Address:
Standard Mail:
Payment Center
PO Box 5241
Carol Stream, IL 60197-5241
Overnight Mail:
Payment Center
1301 Tower Drive
Schaumburg, IL 60173---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you live in AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, KS, MT, NE, NM, NV, OK, OR, TX, UT, WA, WY, AE, AP
Payment Address:
Standard Mail:
Payment Center
PO Box 60136
City of Industry, CA 91716-0316
Overnight Mail:
Payment Center
941 Corporate Center Drive
Pomona, CA 91769
Note that the messages below are not emails per se, although we receive a generic email notification each time AccountCentralOnline posts a new message to our account page-- they are secure messages sent to and from, through this financial institution's internal website form. There is no way the customer can block them; there is no way the customer can "opt out" of them; there is no way the customer can ignore them; there is no way to delete them without reading them. When notified of their existence, the customer has no choice but to heed the email notifcation that an "official" message is waiting on the account page, then go to the website, log in, navigate through the menus and read each and every one, because any given message from AccountCentralOnline could contain critical account information -- perhaps, for instance, the company is notifying the customer of a horrendous interest hike -- something that would require the immediate attention of the customer, or perhaps the company is notifying the customer that any given payment was not honored, a problem which could cause the customer, as we'll see, ludicrously high fines and penalties in a matter of hours, if not tended to quickly. The problem is that this company has set up their system in such a way that the customer MUST react to notifications stating that a message awaits on the company's website. But as we'll see, below, few, if any of those messages, are legitimate, or serve to rectify any problem or, indeed, serve any purpose at all. The company forces the customer to react and/or respond to messages which serve no legitimate purpose whatsoever, yet the company will not be dissuaded from issuing them. Time is money. This company has deliberately cost us time, repeatedly, intentionally. Perhaps even illegally. We've decided we should be paid for it.
Our messages appear in PURPLE; AccountCentralOnline's Messages in RED, our explanations in BLACK
06/06/2008 09:09 PM
You have charged us a "late fee", even though you were paid on time. This is the second time you've done this, and we're
not going to roll over for it this time. We pay you every single month. It's set up as an auto-pay through our bank. We can
prove that the payments were made, and when they were made. You can reverse this, or you can face us in small claims court.
This is nothing short of plain old theft.
Dear Customer,
This message is in response to your recent inquiry concerning your credit card account.
Our records indicate that for your statement dated 04/29/08, a payment in the amount of $24.00 was due on 05/24/08. Your
payment in the amount of $200.00 was received and posted on 05/28/08. Since the required payment amount was not received by
the due date, a late fee in the amount of $39.00 was assessed on 05/24/08.
Unfortunately, we are unable to comply with your request to remove the late fee from your account. According to your
Cardmember Agreement and Disclosure Statement, we must receive your payment amount by the payment due date or a late fee
will be assessed. Thank you for your inquiry. We value your business and hope we can be of service to you again in the future.
Sincerely, Neelam
Account Central Specialist
Cardmember Services
NOTE: We believe that if this payment was not credited to this account in a timely manner, it was AccountCentralOnline's screw-up. We've seen many cases in which a financial institution will actually receive a payment on time, but mysteriously not "get around" to posting it to said account until such time as a late fee can be collected. We were actually able to prove our case several years ago when a New Jersey institution tried to nail us for $63 in "late fees" by saying that the payment they had received on a certain day, did not actually come in until exactly 30 days later. They were forced to refund our money, which they did grudgingly and rudely, and we were then subjected to criminal harassment for roughly two years afterward. Remember the big news when HP was caught spying on customers who gave them trouble? We like to think we were at least partly responsible for the investigation that revealed those facts. One of the Master Minds of that fiasco now works for the John McCain election effort. In any case, this payment should have reached AccountCentralOnline on Friday, 5-24-08. If AccountCentralOnline was not in a position to have their office staffed and working to post payments to customers' accounts because the staff all went home early due to the three-day Memorial Day weekend, then the posting should have occurred on the next business day, which was Tuesday, 5-28-08 and no penalty should have been assessed to ANY customer. In fact, it appears to us that this is exactly what happened -- We believe AccountCentralOnline probably quit early on Friday, and didn't post some quantity of payments to customers' accounts, but then charged this ludicrous late fee when they did post the payments on 5-28. AccountCentralOnline could have made millions on this ploy, and, reasoning that only a small percentage of customers would catch it and complain, they felt justified in running the scam. After all, morality means less than nothing to virtually every financial institution -- it's only a matter of "What can we get away with..." Remember, AccountCentralOnline has already admitted that it assessed and charged us the late fee ON THE SAME DAY OUR PAYMENT WAS DUE (it's in writing, directly above this entry, in red). How did they know that payment wasn't going to arrive that day, until that day was over? They didn't know and they didn't care -- they were so anxious to claim our lousy forty bucks that they couldn't even wait for it to become due, they merely got tired of waiting, and assessed the penalty before they had any right to do so. This is greed on mega-steroids, but is it also simply premeditated theft? Is this what our financial institutions have devoled to, just plain old, garden variety stealing? In many cases, it is exactly that. Remember: The due date of this payment was 5-24-08. We had until midnight of 5-24-08 to make said payment. That means that any penalty could not be assessed until 5-25-08, yet by AccountCentralOnline's own written admission (above), they assessed an outrageous late fee penalty on the same day the payment was due. We do not believe this is legal -- we PROMISE it's dishonest.
06/06/2008 10:00 PM
We are paying this card off at this very moment; you'll never make one more cent in interest from us. You are penny wise,
and dollar stupid. You've managed to stick us for $40, but you've lost hundreds in future interest. We hope it was worth it
to you. You can shove your service up your ass.Card Member Services 06/06/2008 09:43 PM
NOTE: We paid off the card in its entirety at exactly that moment.
10:02 PM
Dear Customer,
We are sorry to hear that we may be losing your business and hope that you will reconsider.
If you wish to close your account, please call 1-800-847-2911 to reach our Customer Care Department.
Be advised that it will be necessary to destroy all cards and convenience checks associated with this account. If there is
a rewards program related to this account, please be aware that all accumulated points are forfeited with the closure of
the account. Keep in mind that we are unable to reopen accounts after they have been closed. It will be necessary to destroy all cards
and convenience checks associated with this account. If there is a rewards program related to this account, please be aware
that all accumulated points are forfeited with the closure of the account. Thank you for your inquiry. We value your business and
hope we can be of service to you again in the future.
Sincerely,
Neelam
Account Central Specialist
Cardmember Services
That should have been the end of this exchange, except that we didn't know FOR CERTAIN that Accountcentralonline would NOT close our account, just to be ass's. We no longer put ANYTHING past financial institutions. To DOUBLY DOCUMENT the fact that we did not want the account closed, we fired back the following.
06/06/2008 10:17 PM
You were not asked nor directed to close this account. We are simply taking steps to ensure that you never, ever profit
from us again. We do not wish to hear from you again unless you are asked to respond.Card Member Services 06/06/2008
Of course our demand to be left alone pissed these folks off. So rather than just letting it go, they HAD to respond. We received an email advising us that Accountcentral online had posted an important message to our online account page. Not knowing if it really WAS "important", we had no choice but to fire the browser up again, navigate to the page, log in, navigate to the message section, and read their important message. Of course it was not an important message at all, just nonsense, sent manually by "Usha" (yeah, right):
Dear Customer,
We appreciate the time you have taken to contact us.
Please feel free to contact us in the future, if you have a specific question or concern regarding your account. Note that
you do not need to reply to this email unless you have any additional questions or concerns regarding your account.
Thank you. We value your business and hope we can be of service to you again in the future.
Sincerely,
Usha
Account Central Specialist
Cardmember Services
Clearly the above was just meant to piss US off, to demonstrate to us that accountcentralonline wasn't about to be told they couldn't contact us. We replied with the following, hoing they would GET that we were going to tolerate their little tantrums..
Message Category:PaymentMessage Name:late chargeMessage Number:1483948Status:Submitted
Message and Replies: 06/06/2008 11:06 PM
You were instructed to cease and desist sending messages to us via this forum unless we had approached you and asked you to
do so. Clearly we did not approach you nor ask you to respond. Each time we receive a notification from you that you have
sent us a message through this medium, we must take time out from our schedule to log in and read your message. When those
messages are sent for no legitimate reason, but only to harass and annoy, you may be liable for the time we must expend to
address those unwanted messages, and you could well find yourselves facing criminal charges of harassment. Our posted shop
rate is $55 per hour with a one hour minimum. If you contact us one more time, when you have no legitimate reason to do so,
except to harass and annoy, we will bill you for this time. We will also forward your behavior to the banking commission,
your local police department, the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Affairs division of the Attorney General, and we
will post this entire transcript online so that your existing and potential customers can see what they're in for if they
elect to do business with you. Again: Cease and desist. This will only cost you money if you persist in this childish
scheme.Card Member Services 06/06/2008 10:38 PM
Of course these folks were as compelled as a spawning salmon to pester us even more. Again we received the email stating that accountcentralonline had posted an important communication to our online account page. Perhaps they were reversing the late fee. Perhaps they were advising us they were closing the account. Perhaps....well....who knew? Again we had no choic e but to repeat the whole damned thing and go back to their page to see what "important message" might be waiting. And here it is:
Card Member Services 06/07/2008 01:31 AM Dear Customer, This message is in response to your recent inquiry concerning your credit card account. In order to assist you with this matter, we suggest that you contact us at 1-800-379-7999 and a Customer Care Representative will be able to provide you with more information. Representatives are available to speak with you from Monday - Friday 6 a.m. - 11 p.m. CT; Saturday and Sunday 7 a.m. - 8 p.m. CT. Thank you for your inquiry. We value your business and hope we can be of service to you again in the future. Sincerely, Sravanthi Account Central Specialist Cardmember Services
Was this just an automated reply that their system was mindlessly kicking out? No. This is a different message from the ones above. Someone had to CONSCIOUSLY CHOOSE to send it. It was sent as a REPLY to our demand to be left alone; that, in and of itself, proves that they received our demand, and CHOSE to disregard it. We now knew we were in for an orchestrated regimen of harassment. The proper legal posture at this point was to make one or a few more demands to be left alone, then document all unwanted contact, and forward the matter to law enforcement. We responded with the message below:
Again we direct you to cease and desist what is clearly to us a premeditated scheme of criminal harassment. You have no legitimate reason to contact us; you have been advised twice, in writing, to cease and desist. You have ignored those demands. You know that we have no choice but to act upon you continued messages, in case a message does happen to be legitimate and contains urgent information about our account. You are using this to force us to waste time logging in, retrieving, and reading your messages. Your messages serve no purpose except to harass and annoy. Any judge will agree. We now consider your harassing messages to be of a criminal nature. You have set into motion the remedies we listed in our previous demand that you cease and desist. We have now posted a transcript of this fiasco at the following URL, where it will remain forever:
http://www.truth-or-consequences.com/badder_business_bureau/accountcentralonline/accountcentralonline.html
Every new instance of harassment by you will be documented at that same URL. Copies of our police complaint, and other complaints, will be documented at that same URL. We believe you to be a company that employs, or is possibly owned or managed by, a criminal element. We believe that if and when we can get your actions in front of a judge, said judge will deem your actions to be of a criminal nature. Again: Our account has been paid off. You have Z-E-R-O legitimate reason to contact us. Again, you are directed to cease and desist. You've shown the world what kind of behavior you're capable of -- it will NOT be in your best interests, or the best interests of your company, to continue your regiment of harassment. You will receive our bill via registered mail in the next week. Our criminal complaint against you will be filed on Monday. Again: cease and desist. You are only providing us with more and better ammunition with which to actually bring prosecutable charges against you, and with which to win a judgment against you in civil court. We're not asking you, we're telling you: Leave us alone.
After delivering the above, w e expected more harassment momentarily. We didn't have to wait long. This particular "important message" (below) was (nearly) identical to the previous one. So was THIS their first message which was automatically generated by the accountcentralonline computer system? No. And we can prove it. We can PROVE that this, and all other messages, were sent to us manually, purposely, by their bottom-feeder employees. How can we prove this? Look at the signature near the end of the message above. It reads: "Sincerely, Sravanthi Account Central Specialist Cardmember Services". Now read the same line from the harassing message shown below. It reads: "Sincerely, Sai Account Central Specialist Cardmember Services". It was MANUALLY sent by a DIFFERENT PERSON. These are NOT automated messages spewed forth by an unthinking system; this is purposeful, premeditated harassment. This is what the world has come to expect from ANY derivative of HSBC. Of course when the email notification came in, we had no way of knowing if this truly WAS a legitimate message this time, or if it was merely more stupid harassment. We still had to stop what we were doing, read the email notification, start up the browser again, navigate to their web page, log in, navigate to their message center, and read their bullshit once more. All of this takes time -- time that accountcentralonline has NO RIGHT to cost people. If accountcentralonline's time to process a "late payment" (one they undoubtedly, in our view, CAUSED to be late) is worth a whopping FORTY DOLLARS (and how much time is required to process a late payment, as opposed to an on-time payment?), then OUR time to be continually harassed with nonsensical and non-productive messages from accountcentralonline is worth at least as much. As it happens, we find that they are a registered corporation in our own state (see address below in case anyone else would like to sue them). This means that it's about as easy as snapping one's fingers to haul their smug, dirty, arrogant little asses into small claims court. We've taken UPS to task in that manner, and won. We've taken Washington Mutual Bank to task in that manner, and won. We generally sue one or two dishonest businesses a year -- and through thirty years, we have never once lost. Can we win a judgement against accountcentralonline? We're researching it now. We "believe" we can, but we want to KNOW we can before filing the suit. Accountcentralonline didn't disappoint; they pestered us YET AGAIN with the following:
Card Member Services 06/07/2008 02:12 AM Dear Customer, We appreciate the time taken to contact us regarding your inquiry. In order to further assist you with this matter, we suggest that you contact us at 1-800-379-7999 and a Customer Care Representative will be able to provide you with more information. Representatives are available to speak with you from Monday - Friday 6 a.m. - 11 p.m. CT; Saturday and Sunday 7 a.m. - 8 p.m. CT. Thank you for your inquiry. We value your business and hope we can be of service to you again in the future. Sincerely, Sai Account Central Specialist Cardmember Services
To further document our plight, we fired back as follows:
06/07/2008 02:31 AM Each time you initiate another instance of harassment, your system generates an email which is sent to our system. You have been asked repeatedly to cease and desist; you CHOOSE, however, to continue with this harassment. Our criminal complaint will include each instance. We know that you have the option to stop this; you CHOOSE to manually initiate each and every instance of harassment. That behavior is prosecutable. Again: Cease and desist. You may NOT email us again.
But the harassing messages from accountcentralonline continued even after that. At this point we believe we've adequately documented the mentality of this company. We are sending a copy of this web page to the company by process server (to their corporate agent in Washington state), so that they will not be able to use the defense that they were "unaware" of our demand that they cease and desist. Indeed, they continued to send us emails many times that were in direct response to our demands that they stop, each one being "signed" by a different rep, each one with different content. An auto-generated message does not change each time it's sent out; that's one form of documentation that proves their harassment is intentional, and serving them with a cease and desist demand will serve as a second form of documentation should they continue even then. That will satisfy the groundwork requirements for bringing formal criminal charges in this case. We believe we have demonstrated that this is a company staffed, and probably owned and/or managed, by the bottom-feeders of the world. Note that if AccountCentralOnline's defense is going to be that their system "automatically" responded, they must explain why EVERY SINGLE RESPONSE was different. Indeed, every response was necessarily CHOSEN, by hand, manually, deliberately, and queued to be sent. Again: This indicates a DELIBERATE regimen of harassment.
As of 00:47 hrs. Pacific (03:47 hrs. eastern), 5-7-08, the same types of emails and messages from AccountCentralOnline are continuing to come in unsolicited. We have not contacted them again. We won't continue to post them, but will only report their numbers at the conclusion of this case. This is clearly a rogue company where bad employees are going to sooner or later end up costing this corporation dearly. If management is this out of touch with the actions of its employees (or perhaps even condones it), then a change of management is clearly needed.
C T CORPORATION SYSTEM
1801 WEST BAY DR NW STE 206
OLYMPIA
WA
98502 Registered receipt #2103 8555 7491 4254 XXXXThis will serve as our fourth legal, documented demand that you (AccountCentralOnline.com, HSBC Financial Services, HSBS Card Services et al) cease and desist contacting us (account # 4730680107XXXXXX), at any time, by any means, unless you have legitimate, account-oriented reason to do so. Our experiences with you to date are documented at the following URL (copy enclosed); all new incidents of harassment will be documented there as well:http://www.truth-or-consequences.com/badder_business_bureau/accountcentralonline/accountcentralonline.html
We are preparing a criminal complaint at this time for instances that have already occurred.
Again: Cease and desist.{Signature}
5-7-08http://www.truth-or-consequences.com/badder_business_bureau/accountcentralonline/accountcentralonline.html