After constant Googling I found a guaranteed approval card that said no credit history was OK, and didn't ask for a deposit. I immediately signed up for it at CrownJewelers.com and:
Their jewelry is oh so obviously FAKE! Everything from the cheapest item on the website to the most expensive item on the website looks like it came out of an old CrackerJack box. Diamonds and rubies my foot.
They have hidden fees and hidden charges that they tack on after you've placed an order.
Their website changes from secure to not secure when you're entering sensitive data, making it easy for whoever is "watching" to steal your personal information and your payment information.
There's a lot of bad reviews on this forum and others about this company, including some Ripoff Reports and many complaints of identity theft as a result of entering data at CrownJewelers.com (which makes it sound like an inside job to me). There's also people saying the guy running the site is selling customer data on the darknet!
Definitely do not deal with this company!!
My personal experience trying to build my credit with them is that if you're too smart for them, they make up some. bogus story and ban you from their website - as if you the customer are the problem.
What I did was, buy the cheapest item on the site and pay it in full immediately. it was only like twenty bucks plus a shipping charge of about half that and some misc charges they tacked on AFTER my order was placed ($2 to pay online, $5 to pay by phone).
So I pay the order off and go to pay the down payment of $5.50 but... there's no way to pay the down payment because there's no button to way to do that anywhere on the website.
The link to make a down payment in My Account led to a white page that said "Internal Server Error".
Thinking this was awfully fishy (not paying gets you in trouble right?) I contacted customer service. I felt unusually nervous about adding my screenshot, thinking that if they were up to something they'd want to get me out of their hair right away. Show a crook you have documentation and they bolt, right?
But I did it anyway and I was right! I sent them an email with my screenshot and I contacted them through the form on their website and CrownJewelers.com responded by saying they'd just chosen to cancel my account because they "couldn't verify your social security number". Which doesn't even make sense because how do you issue someone a store credit card if you didn't already verify all their information? And when I went to the site to log in, I find out that they've locked me. out of my account!
This is pure crook, scam behavior right here. I Googled them and found other people's complaints and reports and now I'm really glad I used PayPal from. the beginning with them, because if I hadn't it looks like I'd be in danger of having my stuff stolen!
So to anyone else trying to build credit and you don't have family to simply put you on their card, and you don't have friends to do this specific thing or you don't want to ask because it's inappropriate, don't use any of these 1995 looking websites. Just pay the fee and get a secured card with a major known card company or bank because there's apparently no easy way to start building credit.
