Chip points me to this item in the Los Angeles Times.
Credit card issuer Capital One isn’t shy about getting into customers’ faces. The company recently sent a contract update to cardholders that makes clear it can drop by any time it pleases.
The update specifies that “we may contact you in any manner we choose” and that such contacts can include calls, emails, texts, faxes or a “personal visit.”As if that weren’t creepy enough, Cap One says these visits can be “at your home and at your place of employment.”
The police need a court order to pull off something like that. But Cap One says it has the right to get up close and personal anytime, anywhere
I’m certain that Capital One itself doesn’t intend to visit your home or office, I would imagine that they have lots of lawyers trying to think up every conceivable scenario and write terms to give themselves the broadest possible latitude based on any future hypothetical — rather than this serving as insight into their actual secret plans to show up on cardmembers’ doorsteps.
Furthermore, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act limits what they can do, even if their own terms and conditions do not. They can’t visit you at your place of employment, regardless of what their terms say and that you agree to, if your employer does not allow it.
And contra the article, police don’t need a warrant to visit you. Without a warrant you don’t have to let them in. Just as you don’t have to let in Capital One.
Most likely, in any case, collections at this level would be outsourced to a third party — whose tactics are even more limited than if Capital One was collecting its own debts. That would be simple prudence on their part, because of the PR implications of a confrontation at someone’s home going bad.
“Even the Internal Revenue Service cannot visit you at home without an arrest warrant,” Rofman observed.
Indeed, you’d think the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, would make this sort of thing verboten.
To be clear, you can be visited without a warrant although one would be needed in order to arrest you. And the 4th amendment is protection against government, not against private entities that you contract with, and there’s nothing in the Capital One terms that would appear to grant them rights to ‘search or seize’ in any case.
Besides, Capital One says they don’t actually do any of this stuff.
“Capital One does not visit our cardholders, nor do we send debt collectors to their homes or work,” Girardo said.
The exception to that, she said, is when it comes to big-ticket sporting goods. Cap One has partnerships with makers of gear like Jet Skis and Snowmobiles.
“As a last resort, we may go to a customer’s home after appropriate notification if it becomes necessary to repossess the sports vehicle,” Girardo said.
So Cap One is saying it’s more “Repo Man” than “Fatal Attraction.”
Frankly, this is all moot if you pay your bill on time anyway. And if you don’t you certainly shouldn’t be focused on credit card rewards, but on lowering your interest rate.
As with American Express financial reviews, card issuers extending credit to you want to be able to have confidence you have the ability to repay the funds they are fronting on your behalf, and to find ways to collect if you don’t pay voluntarily.
Those are terms under which lenders are willing to do business, and they make sense to me, although with a competitive credit card marketplace we have choices about whom to do business with if we don’t like the policies or practices of a given issuer.
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Oy… Our country’s understanding of constitutional principles is pretty poor. If the IRS or police couldn’t visit someone’s house without a warrant, they’d never be able to do anything. Even taking a cynical view of it, with as many cop tv shows as there are, you’d figure people would understand what a “knock and talk” is.
eventually someone will get killed showing up at a persons home.
I get as far as I can from anything related to Capital One. They send me at least 2 credit card offers per week on the mail. It goes straight to my recycle bin.
Geez – why the all the complaints about home banking? Its not like they want to get into all your business like the frickin’ NSA… 🙂
So crazy, worse than KGB 🙂
Last time we came close, I ended up with 100K miles…i wish that encounter happen again as it had a very happy ending on my side! Other than that, i’s sticking to the 4th amendment…
This is another reason not to have a capital one card… Now if I did have a capital one card, and they wanted to visit me, they first have to get through the guard at the entrance of my community, and if they can do that, they will be meet by Emily and Maggie, Our German Shepard’s (I hope the people from Capital One can run fast)also if they want to visit me at work, great, since I don’t have an office at HQ and since I work out of home… So please Captial One come visit, Maggie and Emily would love to play with you!
They screwed me more than once with devaluations
I closed my bank account and credit card
Never again
That’s “EXACTLY” it, people who sit on the boards of these mega banks have contacts within the NSA and other large government agencies. Also they take their lead from such agencies as to what they deem to be proper behavior. Therefore if you’re a “lender” and you advance funds to folks and you see your own government completely ignoring any form of privacy protection, it’s only natural that you would pursue policies that are in and of themselves “anti-customer or consumer”. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy whereby every party in the system feels they’ve been screwed in one way or another. Oh BTW, there are MANY bad players when it comes to banks. The list of “banks” I avoid on a daily basis is growing quite long. Just don’t send them any business. They’ll be happy with that arrangement and so will you.
When they see “Gun store” purchases on your statement it may discourage them from visiting.
Apparently there’s some law (at least in California) that in some instances requires a creditor show up in person to collect his debt. I wasn’t aware of it until I signed my mortgage papers a few months ago, when I explicitly waived my right to have the bank come to my doorstep to collect my monthly payments. For a few seconds I wondered what would happen if I didn’t waive this right; I guess the bank would not have extended the loan.
Having signed one’s legal rights away gives one no real protection, they’ll be able to point to one’s signing one’s rights away.
One way contract as such are easily contested in court. If COne is doing it, that means others may follow suit.
They are already in our homes, in our computers in our cellphones. Watched every where. I will make sure I wait for them naked after taking a viagra. And like another poster said, I hope they see my statement to notice I have visited Uncle Charlie’s Gun Depot.
Hopefully they are ready for my surprise too, LOL !!
PS I was visiting a Latin American country not long ago.
I saw a group of clowns followed by a man dressed like a red parrot. They stopped at a house and displayed signs “Deadbeat Debtor” ( in Spanish ). It was exciting for the kids but very embarrassing for the actual family who onwed God knows what….