RM in Virginia said: “In 2005 my husband and I bought a Suzuki motorcycle not realizing it was with a HSBC credit card. We did not receive a statement for the first payment and received a very nasty phone call from the company. It didn’t matter to them that the reason it was late was because they sent the bill to the wrong address. We still had to pay the late fee. On to present day. We refinanced our home. I called HSBC and asked for a payoff amount. Some one named “Richard” told me that it would take 15 days for them to fax the payoff amount to the lawyer but that we could send them them the a check for the balance and after the regular payment was posted. I could contact them and they could give me a refund of the difference. He gave me a payoff amount of $5,065.00.
Today 9/5/08 I spoke to someone named “Tasha” who put me on hold to investigate this. She then told me that the $9000.00 balance that was paid off was the payoff amount and that I shouldn’t have been given a wrong payoff amount for this debt. What I need to know is Do these credit card/auto loans not have a lower payoff balance than what the statement says? I have paid off other cars in the past and the payoff has always been substaintially lower than the balance on the statements. If so, how can I get my money back?”
Editor’s Note: We’ve seen the HSBC/Suzuki scam for years, and wrote a detailed article about it. The bike is financed with daily interest. When HSBC fails to mail the first statement they are actually making sure your monthly payments never pay off the bike. If you have an initial late fee and 40 days of interest before you identify the problem, all of your money goes into HSBC’s pocket. Your payoff will be high even if you keep making payments for 40 years.
HSBC sent the bill to the wrong address? We’ve heard that story many times over the years. This is an outright scam that reflects poorly on HSBC Finance, Suzuki, and HSBC headquarters in London. This is the ninth year of the same scam. It plays like this: No statement in month #1, late fees in month #2, daily interest accrues from day #1, and you never catch up.
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