Arthur D. Hlavaty

Yeah, my credit union's apparently outsourced credit card department does the same thing. Every blasted time I get one of those voicemail messages, I call the credit union on their listed number, and ask to be connected to the credit card fraud people - in spite of the unhelpful message maze. And I explain that I was called from an unrecognised number, and am returning that call in a secure fashion.

It consumes time I rather begrudge, of course - but of all the ways that mega-business wastes my time in the hopes of some slight profit, this is the one I'm most willing to pay. (Sorting their spam from their statements, wasting time dealing with robotic menu mazes, etc. etc.)

The good part is that it also consumes more staff time than if they made it safe for me to call the credit card fraud department directly. (FWIW, there's no entry for that in the voicemail maze, meaning that I have to select 'other' and wait for a human to connect me.) So I figure I'm doing my bit to re-direct the 'externalities' to the right cost centres ;-(

FWIW, this is also the institution that botched handling my mortgage pay off, with the result that my last payment wound up with their collections department. The mortgage had been on auto-pay, but their policy is not to handle the last payment that way - but to nonetheless send the usual monthly paper mail saying that it *will* be automatically deducted. They reversed the penalty after I quoted their own statements back to them, along with a piece of my mind. FWIW, they also made that last payment higher than normal, rather than taking a last partial payment one month later - this could conceivably have been a problem for some other customer with a tighter budget than mine.