The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Maybe it’s because I buy a lot of shit.

Maybe it’s because I am just unlucky.

Whatever the case, I get credit card scammed a lot.

From trips to France and on the Orient Express through to new sets of luggage and computers … you name it, I have inadvertently funded it.

Just my luck I have scammers who have expensive – and sophisticated – tastes.

Now the good [?] news is that because this sort of thing is so rife, the credit card companies are relatively quick to sort it out … or so I thought … because last week I discovered someone had spent almost US$10,000 on my Visa card [at the NYC Apple Store no less] and HSBC couldn’t have been more unhelpful.

Apart from taking TWENTY MINUTES to answer the phone, they then told me they couldn’t do anything until I wrote in to officially tell them there was a problem.

I asked why ringing them up and telling them there was a problem, wasn’t enough … but they said “it was the rules”.

This is also the bank that told me they couldn’t act on my requests as I was in China [and the money & branch I was calling was located in Hong Kong] and that to ‘authorize any action’, I’d have to come into that specific branch.

OK, I appreciate taking instructions over the phone is open to exploitation but I’m supposedly one of their Global Premier customers – which is supposedly for people in my exact sort of ‘live-in-lots-of-countries’ situation – but no one at the Shanghai HSBC offices say they can help me.

And they call themselves the World’s local bank.

Hahahahahahahaha!

Access to my money aside, I am now in the situation where I have to wait over 2 months until HSBC tell me whether they accept they have authorized a fraudulent transaction.

TWO MONTHS!

Can someone tell me what exactly I am paying an annual fee for?

What makes it even more frustrating is that normally, when I’m overseas, they call me every time I try and use my card to ‘check’ it’s a valid transaction – so how they allowed this to happen is beyond me.