Do you trust your credit card provider?


I’m not a very big fan of credit cards, and I much prefer to pay for goods in cash. But a few years ago I had a credit card with a company called ‘Egg’. I didn’t use it very much, and I always paid the full balance off every month, so that I didn’t incur any interest charges.
One day I used the card for some shopping, but it was declined by the retailer’s card machine. This mystified me, so when I got home I rang Egg and asked them why my card had been declined. The reason they gave me was because I had exceeded my £10,000 credit limit.
This came as a massive shock because: (a) I always pay off my credit card balance in full every month, and (b) my agreed credit limit was nowhere near £10,000 anyway.
I explained this to the call centre adviser and he replied: “Sir, you DO have a credit card limit of £10,000. In fact you only phoned us yesterday to ask for the limit to be increased - and we agreed to this increase.”
By this point I was getting worried.
But he continued: “A few minutes after we had increased your credit limit, you made a £10,000 cash withdrawal from your card.”
You have probably guessed by now that I was the victim of a credit card scam that left me with a £10,000 credit card bill.
This is a completely true story, and without going into more details, I can confirm that I was able to prove my innocence, and Egg made a full repayment into my account.
But one thing I did as a result was to immediately close down my account with Egg. And I would never consider being a customer of theirs ever again.
With this story in mind, I was fascinated to read this week that more than one in 10 Britons have had to cancel a credit or debit card in the past year due to online fraud. This is according to new research by comparethemarket.com.
The latest statistics show a big increase in cyber-crime, with the number of people cancelling cards rising from 4.5 million to 5.5 million since the research was last conducted in September 2016. These findings add to concerns that consumers’ money just isn’t safe in the bank.
Of the people who had money stolen through cyber-crime, the average amount taken rose from £475 to £600 compared to the last survey.
But most interestingly, almost one in four customers who had money stolen from their accounts have changed (or are in the process of changing) their bank or credit card provider.
Shakila Hashmi, Head of Money at comparethemarket.com said: “These are worrying findings. While banks and their customers are becoming wiser to the serious threat of cyber-crime, this research shows that there is a lot more work to be done to stem the growing tide of attacks. Both the card provider and customer have a responsibility to protect their accounts from intrusion and theft.”
However, despite the lack of customer trust that stems from being hacked, customers are broadly happy with how cyber-attacks are dealt with. In the survey 91% of people who were the victim of a hack, said they were satisfied with the way in which the company handled the issue.
So 91% of customers who were hacked say they were “satisfied” with the way it was dealt with by the bank, but 25% of them STILL chose to switch bank as a result of the problem.
That says an awful lot about how easy it is to lose your customer’s loyalty when they lose trust in your ability to provide a safe and secure service.

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