Credit card issuers sent out a record 3 billion direct-mail solicitations last year to U.S. households. You'll still get offers. The court won't let you accept credit offers, but you'll likely keep getting them anyway. Nothing has done more to put plastic in the pockets of the average consumer than direct-mail solicitations. But the gusher of card offers has also drawn strong criticism.
Regulators regularly throw up red flags about direct-mail offers.
The OCC criticized some card issuers for not managing risk properly, not analyzing new markets in advance, making poor choices in the customers they solicited, changing underwriting standards without first testing them and not following up to see how the newly solicited customers worked out. That didn't happen. Two years later, the number of direct-mail offers is still going up. Mailed credit card offers tripled from 1991 to 1997, said Lisa Itzkowitz, marketing director for BAIGlobal Inc., a New York consulting firm that tracks the direct-mail industry. Preliminary figures show they're zooming again this year.