A Reward Lesson Learned

[Anonymous]

Not exactly a scoring related post but...

I'd recently purchased a product for a $1000+ dollars at a local reatailer. That purchase was made using this reatailer's branded Mastercard; pretty straight forward, so far. Couple weeks post purchase, I needed to return this item to that store; unfortunatel, that Mastercard that was used for the purchase transaction was 'Frozen' as it has been lost, stolen... whatever (it was eventually located). That said, since that Mastercard was inactive, the refunded amount of $1000+ dollars was credited back to a completely different credit card, in this case, a Capital One VISA. Still, pretty straight forward; no problems. Here's the catch; I noticed my 'Rewards' account that is part of that Capital One VISA credit card was dinged $12.** for the return credit even though the original purchase was not made on that account and there were $0.00 in points earned and or paid out from that original purchase. Making sense so far? Hope so. I'd contact customer service at CapOne and to my suprise I found out (learned) that any return credits applied to an account, at least in CapOne's case, auto-generate a deduction from ones rewards accounts, regardless of where that credit is coming from; in this case, from a entirely different bank.  So in the end here, there's no real loser as reward points were earned on the original credit care (the 'lost' one) and were deducted from the other card that had nothing to do with orignal purchase. If anything was lost, it was the 1% rewards points that were paid for the orignal purchase along side a $1.5% deduction from the CapOne card rewards account. Just an interesting (or not) credit card rewards related story. 

-Blame it on caffeine.

[thornback]

Huh... thanks for sharing.  I never thought about how rewards would work in such a scenario, so good to know.   Thinking about it now, i imagine this is how it may work with many lenders, not just CapOne. 

And welcome to the forums, Chipper!

[Anonymous]

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Wow, that's good to know. Thanks for sharing your story. 

[MrCreditInternational]

I had the same problem: bought something using a random card then returned it to my amex BBP (lost 2x points)

I complained to amex but that got nowhere. It is really annoying.

[Anonymous]

Yes thank you for sharing and welcome. I’ve never thought about that either but I guess it makes sense or people could just get in the rewards and do it serially.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing, and welcome to the forums

[Anonymous]

Thanks.