Walmart BillPay Difficulties
Flyertalk is lighting up with reports of people having trouble paying credit card bills using Walmart BillPay. Most folks are reporting that the credit card payees are all gone from the BillPay list! Even the generic “Visa” or “Mastercard” isn’t showing up. [UPDATE: Now it seems that it varies by location with many places still okay.]
Paying credit card bills at Walmart has long been a great way of liquidating gift/debit cards. Buying money-orders at Walmart is unaffected by this change.
Some people are still reporting success with Bill Payments at Walmart, but many are having difficulties.
The BoA Consumer Loans Angle
The most surprising factor to me is that there are numerous reports of Bank Of America Consumer Loans not working. BoA Consumer Loans was long the work-around way of paying Fidelity Amex which is administered by BoA.
This surprises me because there’s no reason for them to disable Consumer Loans, even if they decided to stop credit card payments. It’s possible that real BoA Consumer Loan payments would go through; the data-points seem to indicate that the option was on the list, just the system wouldn’t accept the card number as a valid payee account. But the fact that Fidelity Amex can’t be paid any more means that they coded those account numbers not to process.
If this is true, it would indicate a high-tech and high-level decision to obliterate credit card payees from the system, not a timid attempt to stop them from pulling up in the system.
The Source of the Problem
A big question still remains: is this a problem at the Walmart level or at the CheckFreePay level?
One simple way of figuring this out is to see if CheckFreePay at other locations outside Walmart is still showing credit card payees. Remember, KMart also has a BillPay service, and they also use CheckFreePay.
There are conflicting reports on Flyertalk as to whether Kmart BillPay is still working properly or not. One CheckFreePay rep said that it does not affect Kmart stores, but others had trouble at Kmart. This is leading me to believe that we have a CheckFreePay-level issue here. [UPDATE: Some report not having success at Walmart, but still having success at Kmart.]
To end on a positive note, let’s hope this is just a temporary glitch.
Developing…
HT: Free-quent Flyer
