Consumer complaint received 2019-05-20
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
State: MA
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a purchase shown on your statement
Sub-issue: Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement

Complaint:
This complaint relates to a consumer credit card we closed several years ago. Last spring -- long after the card was closed -- Bank America apparently recorded some kind of charge on the card, without our authorization, from a company we don't currently recognize. It appears -- as we later learned -- that Bank America then started sending us bills in the mail. We didn't make the charge in question. We hadn't authorized Bank America to record any charges after the card closed. And, of course, with the card closed down so long ago, we weren't expecting any statements from Bank America, so we didn't open our mail looking for them, and we didn't see anything they sent. Like most people, we get lots of unsolicited mail from financial companies. If anything arrived last year with a Bank America return address, we probably threw it away unopened. 

The first time we became aware of this situation was last XXXX, when we happened to open an envelope to find an " overdue '' statement for almost {$400.00}, on this long-closed card. The {$400.00} included many months of interest and hundreds of dollars in monthly late fees, far beyond the amount of the original spurious " charge. '' We called Bank America to try to find out what this was about. We were bounced around for over an hour. We eventually landed in the credit and collection office. The representative was rude and unresponsive. She told us the charge had posted last spring and " was valid, '' but refused to give any information about what company posted it, or what the charge was for, or who incurred it, or how it could have been posted without our authorization to a closed-down account. Nor would she even consider waiving any part of the interest or late fees she claimed Bank America was owed. Her only position -- expressed belligerently, without any reasoned explanation -- was, " you owe it. '' The credit and collections representative also claimed we'd called them in XX/XX/2018 ( which we don't recall ), and she claimed Bank America conducted an investigation of the charge at that time. We didn't remember any such call. We expressed bafflement at this. We asked for more information. She refused to give any. She wouldn't tell us what investigation was done, or what the investigation allegedly showed, or how or why it was resolved against us. We assume all this information would have been recorded in Bank America 's file notes somewhere, and it should have been a simple matter to look it up, but she refused to even try to do so. 

We hung up literally shaking with anger and frustration. Eventually we called back and spoke to someone else at Bank America, who was NOT in the Credit and Collections Department. This person was much more sympathetic : She said she had no idea how the Bank could have recorded a charge against our account, so long after the card was shut down. She agreed to " look into this, '' and terminate interest payments while she did so. I've never heard back from her. Instead Bank America [ probably the first woman ] seems to have turned us over to collections. 

We are now getting regular dunning letters and phone calls at work from a company called " XXXX XXXX XXXX. '' Our credit rating is being ruined. We still have absolutely no explanation from Bank America about what this is about.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation