Avoid Barclays Bank credit cards

[Laroshek]

If you value any degree of credit card protection from fraud, stop using or do not accept a credit card managed by Barclays (Bank) of Delaware. Despite mounds of documents I provided to prove credit card fraud, Barclays rejected my dispute, instead choosing to allow Mexican criminals to steal $20,000 from me. Mexican "timeshare buyers,"with whom I met in-person, talked me into allowing "escrow" money to be charged (in four charges) to my Barclays RCI Mastercard as my "good faith" intention to sell my timeshare membership. The amount I was to receive was somewhat more than I had paid for it more than 15 years ago. For the transaction, I received a contract and credit card receipts for the money going into an "American escrow company." The contract stated 100% guaranteed return of my escrow deposit in the payment I would receive from the sale. Also stated plainly in the contract was a 60-day right of recission. I discovered two days later that the charges to my Barclays RCI Mastercard actually went to a Mexican entity called "Booze Cruise" and no such "American title company" existed. Within 5 days of the transaction, I filed with Barclays to dispute the charges. Because of the foreign currency conversion, Barclays slightly changed the amounts charged such that those amounts no longer matched my documented amounts exactly. The result was that Barclays refused to return a credit to my account because the amounts in my receipts did not match the charges on my statement and the vendor name did not match where the charges were actually made--that was the fraud! I also learned that, unlike other credit card banks' dispute processes, Barclays makes no attempt to contact the vendor to question the source of disputed charges. Furthermore, upon rejecting my initial dispute, a Barclays representative agreed to open a fraud investigation and extend provisional credit. Four days later, I phoned Barclays and learned that the bank had refused to consider my fraud case, even though their representative had provided a case number. My statement came past due due during the interim, significantly impacting my credit score. Bottom line: Barclays does not care about protecting its customers from fraud. Barclays refused to recognize their own complicating actions, refused to contact a fraudulent vendor to recover stolen funds, and did nothing to address their lie that caused my credit score to drop. In the end, Barclays chose complacence over a criminal activity that severely damaged a (formerly loyal) customer.

 

[chapjim]

Gosh! That sounded like a heckuva a deal. $20,000, more than you paid fifteen years ago. All kinds of promises. Hard to see what could have gone wrong.