Credit Card

When the fancy of Arnold Wayne Hennessey Jr., 20, turned to love last March, Hennessey turned to a relative's credit card, police said. He secretly copied down the number, investigators said. Then Hennessey let his fingers do the courting, dialing those pay-for-passion telephone numbers whose doe-eyed appeals fill the late-night TV airwaves as often as he liked, investigators said. And he apparently did it often because his hot-talk total for titillation reached $400, investigators said.

A Chester County woman's substantial electric bill and access to an elderly woman's credit-card information led to criminal consequences, police said. Sharonda L. Thompson, 35, of Coatesville, was charged Wednesday with access-device fraud and related offenses, said Westtown-East Goshen Township Det. William Cahill. Cahill said relatives of an elderly woman who lives in Wellington, an assisted living complex at Hershey's Mill in East Goshen Township, reported in January that the woman's credit card had been used to pay a $1,300 Peco Energy bill that was not hers.

Dear Mr. Credit Card: I am writing to thank you very much for the great credit card your company sent me! I don't get very much mail, so when I saw the envelope in the mailbox I was really, really surprised. On the front you wrote in big letters: "WALLY P. SMECKLOWITZ: YOU HAVE BEEN PRE-APPROVED!!!" I didn't know what pre-approved meant, but I opened it up and it said you wanted me to have a new credit card, so I signed it and mailed it back and you sent me one! I went to the toy store, and they let me buy a whole lot of stuff!

In a blow to consumers with poor credit ratings, the Supreme Court ruled today that disputes between cardholders and companies that issue credit cards to people with weak credit can be handled through arbitration. The justices ruled 8-1 to reverse a San Francisco appeals court ruling allowing cardholders to sue in federal court. The latest high-court ruling is another in a series of decisions by the high court in favor of arbitration. Consumers in the suit had argued that they were promised an initial $300 in available credit, but were charged $257 in fees in the first year they had the credit card.

An hour after a landscaper going home from work was beaten to death with a brick in West Philadelphia, a man accompanied by two boys walked into a store four blocks away and used the victim's credit card to buy three fitted baseball caps. The purchase was captured on a surveillance video, and yesterday, police released it in an effort to find the man. (The tape can be viewed at www.philly.com.) Detectives said they did not know whether the man was the killer of Corey Moody, but they certainly would like to talk to him. In police parlance, he is a "person of interest.

While other interest rates keep plummeting, one sector of the financial market seems oblivious to the collapse around it. Mortgages are dipping below 10 percent and car loans are no longer unusual at 6 percent, but most of us are still paying annual rates of 18 percent or more on our unpaid credit-card balances. "It's a ripoff," says Elgie Holstein of the Bankcard Holders of America. The feeling is growing that banks are somehow taking advantage of credit card users. In January, the Illinois state treasurer withdrew some $200 million from the First National Bank of Chicago in protest over the bank's 19.8 percent rate.

As President Obama stages a populist campaign against credit card companies' predatory practices, the U.S. Senate is working on regulations to protect cardholders. Meanwhile, Americans' credit card debt has risen to the point where it now tops $960 billion. And with the economy in a downswing, it's hard to see how the debt can ever be paid back. If it's any consolation, South Koreans have been there, done that, and come out alive - if just barely. In 1999, after the Asian financial crisis, the South Korean government encouraged banks to issue credit cards to as many people as possible as a way to increase consumer spending.

Attorneys general in Minnesota and New York accused a Wilmington-based credit-card bank and its Delaware County collection arm of deceptive and abusive practices in lawsuits filed Thursday. Cross Country Bank imposes steep fees that use up much of the credit available on cards marketed to consumers with financial problems, the suits allege. When cardholders can't pay, Applied Card Systems, of Glen Mills, the bank's collection affiliate, harasses them with repeated calls and profanity, the complaints say. "My office will aggressively combat predatory lending and credit practices that prey on vulnerable individuals," Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, said.

New details of Jocelyn Kirsch's reported criminal behavior in California - an act that prompted a federal judge last week to order the former Drexel University senior to wear a monitoring device - have surfaced just as her purported partner-in-crime faces a federal court judge today. According to sources familiar with the California case, Kirsch, while still employed by a Starbucks in Napa, Calif., allegedly stole a credit card from a co-worker's wallet, which was inside a locker at the cafe.

Philadelphia police are searching for a couple who beat an elderly woman with a crowbar in a Northeast Philadelphia grocery-store parking lot Tuesday afternoon, then used her credit card to buy jewelry at a nearby mall. The 73-year-old victim told police she had noticed a man and woman sitting in a white sport-utility vehicle parked next to her car outside the Thriftway Supermarket, 9300 Krewstown Rd., but thought nothing of it. As she unloaded her grocery bags, the man stepped out of his vehicle and began striking her in the head with a crowbar, police said.