Consumer complaint received 2020-09-08
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Other features, terms, or problems — Other problem
Company: CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORPORATION (IL)

Capital One, like all credit cards, has a feature which allows auto-deduction of the minimum payment required from a customer 's bank account. This is set by the customer, and auto-drafts the money from the customer 's selected bank account. 

" Minimum payments '' are of course, only required if there is a balance on the account. Capital One 's system ignores the current balance on the account and only looks a the prior statement balance. What results is that if you pay off your balance during a statement  period, ( e.g. after the XXXX statemtent is published but before the XXXX statement is published ) the " minimum payment '' is STILL deducted from your bank account, causing a NEGATIVE CREDIT CARD BALANCE equal to the minimum payment. Depending upon a customer 's budgeting habits, this can also cause an overdraft on a checking account, if, like me, you keep money in an interest-bearing account and move it to the checking account in order to cover anticipated payments. 

To add insult to injury, Capital One claims that the only way they can send a refund of this payment which should NOT have been deducted is to mail a check, which they claim takes 10 business days to print before it can be mailed. The result is that when they deduct a {$40.00} " minimum payment '' which is NOT required since the balance on the  card is XXXX, they have {$40.00} of my money in their bank for almost a month, after taking into consideration the amount of time it takes to deposit the check at my bank, and for it to clear on their end. 

This has been a problem for years, as when this happened I recalled why I had previously stopped doing business with Capital One circa XXXX. In XXXX, the digital banking era, every other credit card I have can instantly reverse an errant payment, especially one that appears to violate the terms of the agreement, which does NOT require payment if the balance on the card is {$0.00}. Capital One customer service does not consider this to be a valid complaint, insisting that if I set up auto-payments that I am authorizing the payment to be deducted, regardless of whether I have already paid off the balance. This is nonsensical and seems to be a violation of the law. Payment is NOT required if there is no balance, and their programming should reflect that. Furthermore, if they can auto-deduct money from my account they can certainly send it right back automatically, rather than " play the float ' on errors made by their poorly-programmed system. By the way, they told me that they have to mail a check DESPITE the fact that I have a Capital One checking account to which they could certainly deposit the {$40.00}.

They are losing my business except in the most tangential way, since I do not want to close a credit account and hurt my own credit score.  However, I do not intend to prioritize this card in my usage. Capital One does not seem to care about this, and it seems to me that this " error '' in programming, at scale, amounts to a large free loan of money to Capital One when multiplied over the millions of customers they have. Certainly, they should have to pay interest on money deducted from my account errantly, for the entire period that the money is missing from my account, since it is their policy to use a XXXX XXXX rather than a XXXX XXXX system for credits. This is an easy programming fix, and Capital One actually touts their " modern, agile '' tech department to IT professionals like me - this could be fixed if they wanted to, fairly easily, by adding one line of code that stops payments from being deducted on a " current XXXX '' balance.