Debtor's Revolt: Woman Refuses To Pay Off Bank Of America Credit Card
For years, Ann Minch of Red Bluff, Calif.,
has carried a balance of
several thousand dollars on her Bank of America credit card, making
minimum monthly payments
of about $130, sometimes paying an extra $50
or $100. She says she's never missed a payment.
Bank of America rewarded
her loyalty this year by repeatedly raising
her interest rate, which reached 30 percent in July.
Fed up, the 46-year-old
stepmother of two turned to YouTube.
"There comes a time when a person must be willing to sacrifice in
order to
take a stand for what's right," said Minch in a Sept. 8
webcam video. "Now, this is one of those times, and if I'm successful
this
will be the proverbial first shot fired in an American debtors'
revolution against the usury and plunder perpetrated by
the banking
elite, the Federal Reserve and the federal government."
Minch announced that she'd be dumping Bank of
America, refusing to pay
off her credit card debt unless she was offered a lower rate. She
explained that she'd been
a reliable customer even though she'd lost
her job as a mental health case manager. She said bank reps refused to
negotiate
her interest rate when she called them to complain a few
weeks ago.
"You are evil, thieving bastards," she said
in her video. "Stick that
in your bailout pipe and smoke it."
The video made a splash online, getting links from
all kinds of venues
and garnering over 96,000 views as of Monday morning.
Minch told the Huffington Post she fulfilled
part of her threat on
Saturday, when she went to her local BofA branch and closed out her
checking and savings accounts.
She took her money (around $5,000, she
said) and put in a local community bank. She brought printouts of web
pages that
had linked to her video, but a manager wasn't interested in
looking at them.
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"No, we're
just going to let corporate handle it. In fact, I don't
really even need to talk to you," she said she was told. Bank of
America
declined to comment when contacted by the Huffington Post.
Ed Mierzwinski, program director of the U.S. Public Interest
Research
Group, said credit card lenders had better be paying attention.
"Historically, powerful and arrogant corporations,
often protected by
lazy regulators, have ignored consumer complaints -- now social media
tools are leveling the playing
field for victimized consumers,"
Mierzwinski wrote in an email to the Huffington Post. "The old web 1.0
mybanksucks.com sites that no one found are being replaced with
realtime viral outrage that will require big business to start
treating
consumers more fairly or pay the price."
The credit card industry made a villain of itself this year by
benefiting
from billions in taxpayer bailout dollars and then thanking
taxpayers by raising interest rates and minimum monthly payments,
even
on their good customers.
Minch said she hadn't been paying much attention to her account -- she
didn't even
notice when her interest rate went from 12.99 percent to
25.49 percent in January -- but that the more she read about the
$700
billion bank bailout, the angrier she got. Still, the decision to
stage her one-woman revolt wasn't easy.
"When
I finally made my decision about what I needed to do, it was
scary," she said. "I knew I was probably going to ruin my
credit."
Indeed. But Bank of America will be out $5,943.34. Minch shared some
of her statements with the Huffington
Post. Here's part of a screen
grab of her credit card account:
2009-09-14-Picture2.png
Minch sent Bank of America
CEO Ken Lewis a letter demanding that he
watch her video and get in touch.
"If you would like to collect payment
for this account, it will be
necessary for you to view my video and then contact me with your
response," she wrote.
"The video will take less than 5 minutes of your
time, which I know must be extremely valuable because of the
gargantuan
amount of money you are paid."
Minch said that regular folks will continue getting "bent over" by the
government
and the global financial industry unless consumers take a
stand.
"Tea parties and letters to representatives hasn't
done squat," she
said. "We need to form a cyber revolution."
