A few weeks ago Vinh from Miles Per Day posted a set of letters from a reader stating that not only had their U.S. Bank credit card applications been denied, but their existing U.S. Bank credit card accounts had been closed for two reasons:
- Credit bureau report shows a number of recently opened tradelines
- Sufficient credit lines already available to customer
I linked to that post in one of our recaps, but with only a single datapoint it was hard to draw any conclusions (often people aren’t sharing the whole story when it comes to shut downs). Since then I’ve seen a number of other people report the same shut downs occurring:
- Accounts from last year closed within four new applications this calendar year (and applied for two FlexPerks cards during the Olympics promotion)
- Accounts shut down after calling reconsideration, 8 new accounts opened this calendar year. No new USB accounts before this application since 2014.
- Previous accounts closed and then reopened again
It seems like there are a few things at play here, in the cases of shut down I’ve read about two things seem to be consistent:
- People called reconsideration (and usually more than once)
- People applied for multiple U.S. bank cards at once
If you’re going to apply for U.S. bank cards, I’d recommend taking this into account and trying to use up any points you have before calling reconsideration or applying for multiples. It seems that U.S. bank is somewhat cracking down with them also denying some business card applications for people with frozen ARS reports. As always share your experiences and data points in the comments below.
Update: As Vinh points out filing a CFPB complaint also did not work to get the points reimbursed. Usually these complaints work best when multiple people are making the same complaint, so I wouldn’t let that discourage you from making a complaint but just keep in mind it hasn’t done anything in the past.
