Good morning to whoever reads this (though based on other topics here, I can see that it could be days until someone actually takes the time to reply to my question)
Last night, driven by the so exciting offer of being able to pay a purchase balance within 6 months with no interest, I decided to give billmelater a try. This was the first time I ever "used" the service and as such, the first thing I attempted to do was to go to their website and apply for an account.
Now for the facts. I have a perfect credit score (and I sure hope that this incident will not affect that) and there is no reason on earth why I would be declined an account for reasons related to bad credit. Uppon filling up the online form with all my information, reading the lenghthy terms and clicking the "magic button", I imediatelly received a very generic message saying something along the lines of "We are sorry but we were unable to create an account for you". I was very surprised to see how generic this message was given that we are dealing with people's credits here!
Later in some hidden topic on one of their FAQs, I found a sentence that said that the user should not have to create their account but rather start one at the time of a checkout. Very well. I then went to the website where the purchase was to be made (adorama.com), and chose BillMeLater as my payment method. Again I filled up a simple form (date of birth, last 4 digits of SSN, etc) and, to my surprise, I was again unable to proceed. However this time the website's checkout had a more elaborate message about the reasons why that had not worked. It said that some of my personal information added did not match "the records". It was also nice enough to ask me to verify the information and try again. Needless to say I did try again and again it did not work.
I have pulled a personal credit report last night and I can see that BillMeLater has been checking my credit as well, so at least I know that regardless of how bad their online system is, the part where it goes into the credit company's system and pulls your credit report is functioning very properly.
Because my credit is very good and because of the message I saw at the adorama checkout, I strongly suspect that the reason why I could not create an account has to do with the amazingly smart system used by BML not being able to correctly parse my personal information and therefore not being able to verify that I am who I am. Now my question is... if that is the case, is this great lovely company ever going to inform me the reasons why I was declined an account? I called them on the phone and they told me they had no way of giving me that information. Secondly, is this incident involving me being declined an account because of a glitchy system going to be reported to the credit company? I have seen numerous reports of people who had similar problems and needed to spend months and months to fight against an error similar to what I am describing.
I no longer wish to use BML for this transaction, nor will I ever attempt to use the service again. All I need to get is information about this shady account decline and reassurance that they will not hurt my credit because their system was not able to match my personal info/address with "the records". Ps.: I am aware that they use Equifax for their credit checks, and according to my Equifax report, I have added all the correct information.
