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Tara Siegel Bernard exposes the scam perpetrated by stores who push their branded credit cards on eager customers, in today's New York Times. Higher than the normally outrageous interest rates and the fact that simply applying for a new credit card can lower your credit rating are some of the issues she raises.

Some of the areas she doesn't cover are how some employees will fill in faulty information for customers who start to sign up and then change their minds, including forging customers' names and putting in fake social security card numbers. These tend to cause the card to be rejected, which further lowers a customer's credit rating.

Employees at stores that offer such cards are usually under enormous pressure to sign up as many customers as possible, regardless of whether the customer is granted a card or not.


How about Those Gift Cards?

Here's a shocker for you: Ron Lieber reports in today's New York Times that the "TowerGroup, a financial services consulting firm" says that "nearly $5 billion of the money that well-meaning givers have put onto gift cards will go unspent." Now that sounds like a stimulus package to me.

In the business, it's called, "breakage."