Household HSBC Watch

Payments over the Visa and MasterCard networks involve at least five parties. When a cardholder presents a credit card to a merchant for payment, the merchant swipes the card and transmits the information encoded on the magnetic strip on the back of the card to an acquiring bank (or, sometimes, a third party processor). This […]

Seen on the ICP web site: 3/23/2006 — HFC has deceived us over and over again and reading your website made me realize I wasn’t alone. We refinanced with them in 2003 because they were the only ones who would give us the loan at the time. We would have been better off […]

Experian has announced the launch of Collection Triggers, a collections solution that monitors a company’s portfolio of collections accounts and identifies new information indicating the possibility of recovering the debt.

“Our clients have been asking us to help solve the debt dilemma — when collection efforts go cold, the consequence is a huge burden of unpaid […]

The Utah Attorney General explains:
Two real-estate secured loans made at or near the same date to the same consumer (“split loans”, or “loan-splitting”): Plaintiffs allege that such loans were made through unfair and deceptive means, including, but not limited to, misrepresentations or omissions concerning the number of loans, misrepresentation of the benefits of refinancing […]

HSBC Bank Plc came under fire for abusing the United States military, primarily through HSBC Finance Corporation which is former predatory lender Household International. Specific complaints of abuse come as no surprise to Household - HSBC Watch consumer advocates. The watchdog organization performs trend analysis, a project that charts detailed complaints over time. […]

Becky Barrow, Daily Mail, 19 December 2005
BRITAIN’S biggest bank has slapped a ban on rival customers at peak times. HSBC has put up signs in its 1,500 branches warning that other account holders will not be served between 11am and 2pm.

It insisted yesterday that the unprecedented move was meant only to improve the service […]

Labor sleeping with the enemy? — On his blog, Thomas Blumer (”bizzyblog“) makes an interesting point about two late-to-nevercomers to the anti-bankruptcy fight, the AFL-CIO and AARP: they both earn significant income — in the tens of millions of dollars annually — from co-branded credit cards, and thus may have faced internal or external […]

Household - HSBC Watch performs trend analysis based on customer input such as customer complaints and experiences. When data is received from one customer it is compared to previous reports. When specific areas of concern begin to surface they are flagged for investigation. Let’s use a simple example:

(1) 50 reports are received […]

Does this sound familiar? Are these tactics used by other debt collectors? Read this article:
The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal - 4:45 PM CST Monday
State Commerce Dept. fines collection agency
By John Vomhof Jr., Staff Writer

An Illinois collection agency owned by Sallie Mae has paid a $125,000 civil penalty after an investigation by the Minnesota […]

Carl Prindle is one of those people who believe we’re in the midst of a Web renaissance, a moment at which companies are finally figuring out how to actually deliver on the carbonated promises of the bubble years. His company, Waltham-based Furniture.com, was an emblematic late-1990s start-up: Backed with more than $100 million in venture […]