Don’t Swipe Your Card Recklessly
First of all, my heartiest congratulations to Abhinav Bindra J who made India proud by winning gold medal for the 10m Air Rifle section at the Beijing Olympic. It is the first ever individual gold that India won in the history of Olympic.
Now, this post is a little bit personal as I’ll try to put a point across by taking example of one of my friend. But before I dwell into that, let me give a brief update on the latest business scenario.
Inflation is at 18 years high that stands more than 12 percent. Stock market has recovered to some extent and has been on a bullish run for last 10 days or so. Tatas and Reliance Infocom have decided to invest huge sum to create GSM based network while keeping their CDMA services. The central government has decided to come to the exporters’ aid and has announced that it would return taxes already paid.
Well, that’s what I call brief update. J
Now the main topic! The other day I was called by my fried who got some exorbitant Credit Card bill and didn’t know where he spent the money. He called me because we went to some websites one night and used it to get membership. It was quite late in night and he didn’t know how to browse the net properly. L So I told him not to browse the net any more after I left. He did!
For the next 3 months he kept receiving those bills and soon he was in debt. I repeatedly asked him to contact the issuing branch to block the card. He didn’t! But when the bill piled on, he was desperately looking how to get out of debt and this mess. Finally he called the customer service of the issuing bank and they did oblige his request.
I am blogging on this because this might happen to anybody who is regularly using credit cards for online purchase – especially from phony sites. There are lots of instances of unauthorized use of credit cards by hackers who steal the card access codes. So everybody must first check how reputed and trusted the site is (Verisign verification is one of those) before putting the sensitive personal data.
While plastic money in the form of credit or debit cards is of great convenience, one must use it judiciously even if they are not using them online. As one does not have to carry and dish out lots of cash, it is very easy to spend a lot by swiping the card at various counters. Its only after that you start worrying how you pay off credit card debt that is now quite a huge amount.
In India, sometimes it might get quite nasty if one is dealing with private banks. These banks are quite aggressive in their approach and their service standard is quite high what with everybody vying for as much market share as possible in the sector. There have been reports that sometimes these banks are employing musclemen to get back debt from defaulters. There are often reports in newspaper from debt related suicides. This is for this reason that Indian government had to enact a law which makes it illegal for private banks to forcefully get back the money. Sadly, there is no protection as yet for insolvency in our country like they have in the U.S. Hopefully, Indian government will realize this in this changed economic scenario and draw new personal bankruptcy laws like we have for joint stock companies. This will make a lot easier for consumers and small entrepreneurs from loosing their life after getting into debt trap.