Today I learned what CIBC stands for.
The Completely Idiotic Bank of Commerce. I was at Costco a few months ago and they had a kiosk to get a CIBC Mastercard from Costco. Looked good… point reward system, great rate, no fee, sure… what the Hell.. sign me up.
So I get the card in the mail about a week later, and I have used it a lot. I have also made the HUGE mistake of paying the card off every time I use it. If I spend $500 on something, I send $500 to them to pay it off instead of waiting for the end of the statement date. Apparently they don’t like it when you pay off a card as they can’t make interest off of you. I knew I was about to buy an item that was just under $700, and I was making a payment to my card so I added another $700 to the payment so that card would still be fully paid off after my next purchase, which means at the moment I have a $700 credit on my account. Despite having the card for a few months, and having a scan of my drivers license on their system, they had suddenly decided that they also needed a copy of my Passport. There are a few ways they could have conveyed that information to me.
1 – Send a letter in the mail to my address on file
2 – Send an email to the email address on file
3 – Send a message to my account in their online portal
4 – Call me at the number on file.
Guess which method they chose? They decided to lock the card. It took two days of my calling them for them to figure out why there was a lock on the card. They weren’t sure. They kept going from one department to another, until the fraud department finally got involved as the purchase I was trying to make was international. “What are you purchasing?” they said. I told them it was a product I wanted. “What type of product?” . Excuse me? I had to justify my purchase to no less than 4 people. Each and every one of them felt like they needed to know what exactly I was buying. I felt like I was getting permission from my mom to buy a video game. It’s not how I wanted to be treated by a financial institution. I had to go to a branch, show them my passport, then answer some questions I have already answered multiple times on the phone, then go into an office and get on the phone with them again and once again get asked what it was I was buying. Jeebus.. maybe CIBC needs to change their message from “Your Privacy is important to us” and go with something more realistic like “Your Privacy is our Business.. no seriously, we want to know all about your life so we can judge”
So here I am in a parking garage, that only accepts credit card for payment, and I have a credit card with a $700 credit on it, but it won’t authorize $28.40 of parking.
All this in the name of “Customer Service”. At least now I know which bank NOT to deal with anymore.