Consumer complaint received 2020-02-04
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Advertising and marketing, including promotional offers — Confusing or misleading advertising about the credit card
Company: DISCOVER BANK (MD)

On XX/XX/2020 I applied for a Discover credit card online for which I had received a pre-approved invitation letter in the mail with some special terms and conditions, and with a special code to be used to start my online application. This invitation was primarily appealing to me because of its 0 % APR on balance transfers for a certain number of months and {$0.00} transfer fee for any balance transfers to be done for a certain number of months after account opening. I wanted to take up on this offer and applied online. During my application, I was asked which accounts I wanted to make a balance transfer from and in what amount. I mentioned three of my existing card accounts with all of which with different transfer amounts. When I filled out the rest of the forms and finished the application, I was prompted with a message saying that 'unfortunately, my application was not approved for which the reasons I have the right to be revealed but I could still get another Discover card if wanted to. ' I said yes and I was instantly approved. Neither I had any information whether or not this counteroffer had the same terms and conditions as the initial card that I was pre-approved for nor was I questioned if I still want to make any balance transfer to this counteroffered card had it had a different set of terms and conditions. 
A few days later my new Discover card came in the mail. When I opened it I realized that this counteroffered card had a much less favourable set of terms and conditions such as 10.XX % APR on balance transfers, xx % balance transfer fee on each transfer, a higher APR on new purchases etc. When I saw the new terms and conditions I decided not to activate my new card. To my absolute surprise, I received an email from Discover this morning stating that my balance transfer request of {$2000.00} was declined because I had exceeded my credit limit of {$1700.00}. I did not understand how it could be possible to exceed the credit limit of a card that had not yet been activated. When I called Discover, I was told that they went ahead and made a balance transfer from one of three existing credit cards ( XXXX ) those of which I shared the information during my initially pre-approved but later denied application. When I tried to explain to them that I did not know anything about this balance transfer to my counteroffered credit card which had a completely different set of terms and conditions they just said that they were sorry but they could not do anything about it. Furthermore, I also explained that this card had not been activated yet and that I have a grace period to either activate the card and thus by doing so legally acknowledge the acceptance of this account or just return the card and not accept this account, once again they said there was nothing they could do. Even though this balance transfer attempt from my XXXX account is not shown on not even as pending yet, they still refuse to cancel this transaction that is totally against my will. Can you please help me to have Discover to cancel this unjust transaction?