Lost At Sea Part 35

"Did you hear the radio?" he says. "Barclays has just announced its highest-ever profits. Four point five billion pounds. Seven hundred and sixty-one million pounds from Barclaycard."

Wendy lights another cigarette.

"Did your father have a Barclaycard?" I ask.

"Three," says Christopher.

"You'd think that would have triggered something off in Barclays' computers," says Wendy.

"And on top of that," says Christopher, "Barclays gave him a six-thousand-pound loan."

"Oh my G.o.d!" says Wendy. "I didn't know that."

"Which they upped to thirteen thousand pounds," says Christopher. "That's twenty thousand pounds in repayments over sixty months. That's just that one loan."

"How did they let him do that?" says Wendy. "He must have been crazy!" She pauses. "Barclays shouldn't have done that," she says.

Christopher drives me to his house to look at the statements. There are half a dozen files thick with them. There's a Jiffy bag, too, filled with sliced-up credit cards, cut in half when Richard Cullen finally admitted the problem to his wife. MBNA, Goldfish, Tesco, Amex, Frizzell, etc., all sliced up.

A typical page of a Richard Cullen credit-card statement reads like this:

Alliance and Leicester

Interest charged: 71.07

Late fee: 25

Overlimit fee: 25

There are thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of these 25s. Then there are letters, too, like this from Barclaycard:

According to our records your Barclaycard history has been excellent and we have consequently enrolled you in our Guaranteed Acceptance Masterloan Programme. This means we have set aside 7,000 for your immediate access without an application or any questions whatsoever.

And then, later, another letter from Barclays:

Dear Mr. Cullen,

We regret that we have been unable to pay the following, as there were insufficient funds in your account:

Payment in favor of Frizzell for 554.09

Payment in favor of Barclaycard for 339.06

Your account has been debited 30 which is the fee charged when we are unable to make payments due to insufficient funds.

This letter did not come from a human being. A computer, with the printed signature J Smith, churned it out. There are a number of identical ones-signed by J Smith-dating back to 2002. How can Barclays say Richard Cullen didn't seem to be in trouble, when payments were being declined from one corner of Barclays to another? At one point, Richard Cullen went 17p over his Lloyds limit. He was charged 20 for this, and then the interest on that 20.17, and so on.

And then, finally, in the last weeks of his life, scores of letters like this:

Your failure to pay your arrears of 166.04, despite our reminders and offers of a.s.sistance, has forced us to withdraw your credit line and take steps to inform the credit reference agency.

The statements tell the story of a man who thought he could beat the credit-card companies at their own game but discovered that he couldn't. He'd been telling the truth about his absence of secret vices. In the last year of his life, almost every payment on every page of every statement was to a different credit-card company. The odd exception was nothing: a 13 subscription to a gardening magazine, and so on.

But he had lied about one thing. Richard Cullen, at the time of his death, didn't owe 30,000. He owed 130,000.

I CALL KEITH TONDEUR of Credit Action, which monitors our spiraling debt problem. I tell him what Wendy had said about how hard it used to be for people like them to get loans.

"That's right," he says. "Thirty years ago you'd go to your local bank manager. He'd say, 'A thousand pounds? You must be joking. I'll give you three hundred.' We go into banks looking for the best advice, but I know one chief executive who describes his branches as 'shops.' We treat our bank managers like we treat our doctors. They say, 'Ah, you'll need to buy some insurance with that, sir.' And we believe them. But in fact we're just being sold things. And this is an industry that's self-regulating. Why is that?"

LATER I HEAR the story of why it takes three days for an electronic transfer to clear. Transfers used to really take three days to clear, in the days they were delivered by carrier pigeon, or whatever. But now, in this computer age, they take an instant to clear, but they keep the three-day rule going so they can accrue three days of interest. The banks make tens of millions from these wheezes.

IN OCTOBER 2003 Matthew Barrett, the CEO of Barclays, was called before the Treasury Select Committee. He was asked about the small print. Even though the base interest rate had gone down to 3.5 percent, buried away in the small print was the revelation that Barclaycard was charging 17.9 percent interest.

"The small print," Matthew Barrett admitted to the committee, "is an eye test for sure." Then he added, "I do not borrow on credit cards. It is too expensive."

I PHONE BARCLAYS again and speak with a press officer. I quote him his CEO's statement, that the "small print is an eye test for sure." He laughs and says, "That sounds like Matthew."

Then he turns serious and says, in terms of the small print, they have made "huge steps forward in the past twelve to eighteen months. All the credit-card companies have taken out the really important bits from the small print and put them in big letters in the summary box."

This sounded comforting. Or at least, it did until the day I attend the International Direct Marketing Fair at Earls Court, West London. This is the junk-mail industry's annual convention.

Even though a sign near the door at Earls Court reads "62 percent of consumers agree with the statement 'I enjoy going through my post,'" the mood here is undeniably panicky. Sue Baker, the PR lady in charge of the event, had told me over the phone, "People are really worried." More and more consumers are ticking the no box. They don't want their details pa.s.sed to third parties.

"The list is severely compromised," said Sue.

An article in today's Direct Marketing International magazine doomily predicts, "In a couple of years there will be no cold telemarketing industry in Norway. Could this happen here? Well, wake up! It is happening."

Six point eight million British people, the article continues, have so far signed up to the telephone preference service, which filters out cold calls.

Everyone is here, from the brokers and profilers, like Mosaic and Baby Marketing, to the myriad businesses that provide the free gifts contained within junk. There's a stand displaying sticks of seaside rock that say "First Direct-The Time Has Come to Suck It and See."

The idea is that if someone is sent a sweet, they will be more likely to take out a loan.

LIKE A CHILD, I am drawn to the bright colors of the Post-it note stand, where Post-it notes of all the colors of the rainbow are displayed within gla.s.s cabinets like rare jewels.

(It is, by the way, possible that Stanley Kubrick may have influenced 3M's decision to diversify from their original yellowy-green into other colors. As a great fan of stationery, he once telephoned the head of 3M to suggest they branch out into blues and reds and so on. The man ostentatiously sighed. "If we did, there'd be no end to it," he said. But it was only a year or two later that the other colors began to appear.)

"Ever thought about using a Post-it note on a direct mail piece?" asks their publicity material. "Studies show that machine-applying a printed Post-it note can increase your response rate by 18 percent."