#Alphaeon Credit Card Login

[moneyvariant]

[aelaer]

Good things happen - and some promotional credit card warnings

A lot of times life isn’t fair, but sometimes life works out just right!

This is totally unrelated to anything fandom and completely personal so feel free to skip over ;D But oh my god this is probably the best birthday present I can currently think of from The American Financial Powers That Be.

Okay, so back in Nov of 2018 I got LASIK. The cost of it will pay itself in the contacts I’d have bought instead for 5 years and I adore not being blind (rather literally, as I was legally blind without lenses) so it was well worth the investment. However, in order to afford it since no insurance covers it like, anywhere in the world I think, I had to do a payment plan. The surgery I had it in had a deal going with Comenity Capital Bank, which do a lot of store credit cards and optional medical procedure credit cards (like LASIK, liposuction, etc - anything considered cosmetic rather than considered medically necessary). One of the many cards they run is called Alphaeon.

Their promotional deal that I went for was 0% APR for 12 months if the card was paid fully in time. With my current job I was able to swing that monthly payment. Great, right?

Turns out they had some catches. They did two things: they encouraged me to go paperless, and put the first payment due date as mid December. Both are important, because it turned out:

The 12 month promo offer did not start at first due date. It didn't even start in mid November as they "deferred" the first payment. The due dates for their promotion offers turned out to be a *different* date than the big, big date blasted monthly in my emails and plastered over my account.

They set the start date several days before my surgery even happened, and because they said that a payment wasn't due until the second month, if I was paying with the idea of paying 12 months, I would still be beyond the "year" they set.

The paperless versions of these statements do not encourage you to click the statement; they encourage you to pay by the *other* date plastered on your account, which is just a "general" due date rather than a "promotional" due date. Nowhere on your account is specifics about promotional due dates expect buried within the statements, which, again, are not the encouraged action on the UX of the emails.

So you can imagine my surprise when, come this November, I owed almost $1,000 of accrued interest they tallied every month over the year (these guys have a ridiculous interest rate of 28.99% on this card).

Even if the last payment WAS due mid November, like I thought, I wasn't able to log in to pay it three days before the date because their whole system was having issues, and they closed their phones before I could get out of work (and hung up on me when I called them 10 min before closing!)

But I ended up calling the bank once I suddenly found I had to pay an extra $950 farking dollars just before Thanksgiving to explain my confusion regarding the date and the fact that when you go paperless, the date being different for promotional offers isn't clear whatsofreakingever.

The lower peons of the bank were very kind but naturally didn't have the power to take off that insane accrued interest. (I just like the word peon, they really were lovely). The manager or whoever I talked to was... well, I guess that's where the stereotype of heartless bankers comes from, because she was that. I'll be happy to tell you that while I totally had a panic attack on the call and was like, crying (because near $1,000) I didn't scream at her at any time. At the end of the call I did inform her that I would be reporting the incident to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because by God, someone was gonna hear how shady their practice was. But I was POLITE about it, dammit!

And then I spent the next 2-3 hours writing a 1,000 word essay for the CFPB. It had several screenshots and was from the POV of someone who has studied UX for a living, got into the big problem with paperless and the UX in the emails for it, the easy confusion that having two different payment dates with vague wording on "oh you *may* have a promotional offer" being under all the action buttons and completely missed on a phone screen, the login issues I had the last three days I thought a payment was due, the damning lack of documentation when I scheduled payments in advance that made it a he-said-she-said battle if the system hiccuped and didn't save a payment, and so on and so forth. I'm very proud of it, and I was gonna use that essay when the company's response ultimately came back with "too bad so sad" to go to my laser eye center and ask them to drop the card as a payment option to protect their future clientele. And then spend a couple hours a weekend going to all local plastic surgery places to do the same thing. Yeah it was gonna be my new hobby.

So I got the company's reply.

THEY TOOK OFF THE ENTIRE ACCRUED INTEREST AMOUNT. THE ENTIRE 950 DOLLARS.

My throat's all sore cuz I'm coming down with something but I'm still just like, screaming from joy. I did NOT think this would work, at all. I really didn't. I did it to help vent my frustrations, warn other people, and to have documentation for my persuasive speech I was gonna give local companies on my off time because I've been to several banking sites, and NONE were like this in hiding the actual info outside of the statements - that were easily missed with paperless.

Holy goodness. I still can’t believe it.

Long story short: Read the actual statements because that’s where they legally have to put in the real due dates, and shady shady shady companies like this may ONLY put it there while plastering another due date all across the site. Especially do this with any type of financing deals with any credit company and store credit cards, as they’re the ones who often pull stunts like this.