Introduction
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my Comenity Bank Virgin America credit card closure shutdown. Well, today I got the letter in the mail explaining why below.
So even with a 748 credit score, they said I didn’t have any real estate (true since the mortgage is in my wife’s name although I help make the payments in the household.) They also said my balances were too high, too many open accounts, and balance/ratio was too high. I’m going to take this to mean that because I let a couple of cards close recently with too high of a balance, they weren’t too happy with that and thus shut me down. The thing that gets me is that they should have seen points #1 and #3 when I opened the card back in November. What a bunch of asshats. Now let me go CFPB them real quick for pulling my CR again w/o my consent and getting my AF and any VX points that haven’t posted yet.
[Edit] Per the comments, Comenity did shut me down for “number of recent inquiries.” In actuality, they saw a recent spike in spend (some people who were shut down didn’t have this spike in spend,) didn’t like it, pulled my CR, then gave me this BS reason to shut me down. For perspective, when I applied for the card in November, I had 7 inquiries and new accounts within 6 months. When they pulled my CR again in April, I only had 5 inquiries and new accounts within those 6 months, so it shouldn’t have been something new that they saw in the 2nd pull. The good news is that it seems this isn’t a bank ban; only 1 card’s shutdown since my VS angel card is still alive.
They SUCK this is such an archaic banking practice
My wife had her Virgin account closed after less than $1500 in total purchases spread out over nearly three months with none of it being MS. We had made two payments using linked bank accounts. We had opened the card using the shopping cart trick. The closing letter said something like too many inquiries. Inexplicable. At least they did credit the annual fee, give the $50 statement credit and the 10,000 point welcome bonus so we weren’t too upset. She has the Marathon card that they left untouched. Closing that would have hurt much more.
Ah thanks for the datapoint Bob. Glad to know they gave you quite a bit of benefit for the one HP before shutting you down.
You’re reading this wrong. They shut you down because of too many inquiries, i.e. someone looked at the account and saw you’re opening too many other accounts. They also included your credit score, and that was affected by those factors.
I agree with this reading, but think that it’s actually just cover for closing the account because they didn’t like the spending patterns. I seriously doubt they go around trolling for customers with a bunch of recent inquiries — seems more likely to me that they automatically flag unusual spending patterns, then an analyst makes up a BS reason for a shutdown.
The odd thing is that someone got shut me down after 6 months with no spike in spend, so either it’s random trolling or something else is triggering their checks.