We're all fed up with banks that gouge us with ever-rising credit card interest rates, obscene fees, and "convenience" charges. But would you lose your job over it?
Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) employee Jackie Ramos did. A story at The Huffington Post recounts Ramos' attempts to help customers who didn't qualify for payment-modification programs, including a cancer-stricken 24-year-old mother who wanted to pay the $6,000 she owed on her credit card.
"She sobbed on the phone telling me she couldn't afford the 30 percent interest," Ramos recounted. "She couldn't afford the $39 late fee. … According to Bank of America, she doesn't have enough income to be put on a program, but she can, however, keep paying the high interest rates on the account, and fees."
Ramos' job was to call customers who were delinquent on their credit card payments and either get them get on a program to help them out, or encourage them to get caught up if they didn't qualify. Too often for Ramos' liking, folks didn't qualify.
"There was something inherently evil about my job," she said. "So I stopped denying people" who needed assistance but didn't qualify.
When Bank of America caught wind of what she was doing, she was fired. But she doesn't single out her former employer: She maintains that the entire system is broken. "I feel like there's a real credit problem in this country," she said. "Now we have 30 percent interest rates, $39 late fees, and over-limit fees. I want the laws changed."
Sure, consumers have a right to be mad over exorbitant fees, especially from banks such as Citigroup (NYSE:C) and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) that fed at the taxpayer trough after their own lending practices got them in a jam. Now it seems as if a lot of those same banks want to double-dip on the consumers who bailed them out in the first place.
That's one side of the argument. The other side, of course, is that nobody makes you go into debt with a bank in the first place.
Where do you stand? Are the banks within their rights to jack up their interest rates and fees, or is it time for a debtors' revolt? Sound off in the comments box below.
