Lost at Sea (18 page)

But Mosaic is packed with the professor’s opinions and judgments—a subjective mind-set that is guiding countless credit-card companies and leading to Happy Families being swamped with offers of easy credit.

Of course, Bruno was right that no company will rely solely on Mosaic—but the computer program is surely indicative of the way things are done inside the whirring, mathematical, computer world of credit-card marketing.

“You’ve probably got enough for a book,” said Bruno as I left that afternoon, which I presume was his way of saying, “Don’t call me again.”

•   •   •

ACCORDING TO THE
National Consumer Council, one in five people are borrowing money just to pay household bills, and one in four are struggling to meet their repayments. Half a million people in Britain have “crippling debts on their credit cards.”

Advice services such as Debt Free Direct—who try to help people like Richard Cullen—say they received 275 percent more calls per day in December 2004 than they did a year earlier. A quarter of those in debt are receiving treatment for stress, depression, and anxiety. Britain’s bailiffs are enjoying 70 percent more work than they did two years ago.

Wendy Cullen is annoyed with Debt Free Direct. In the weeks before her husband’s suicide, he phoned them countless times for help; but, she says, “They did sod all, excuse my language. They’d phone back and say, ‘He hasn’t sent us the right information.’ And I’d reply, ‘I
saw
him send the right information.’”

Wendy says that had Debt Free Direct been more helpful, her husband would be alive today.

•   •   •

I CALL ANDREW REDMOND
of Debt Free Direct. He says they’re required by law “to get all this verification. The creditors want proof that the person in question cannot afford to pay more than they say they can afford.” Andrew says they’ve been fighting this for years.

“This,” he says, “is a classic example of a case when a simplification of the process might have averted a tragedy. We had several conversations with Richard Cullen, and we offered the best advice that we could, but it was too little too late.”

Debt Free Direct have transcripts of all the conversations between them and Richard Cullen. In these transcripts—they say—you can read his continual pleas for help. And then you can read the advisers’ responses—that they can only help if he can provide this verification, and then that verification, and then the last transcript is the phone call from Christopher Cullen saying that Richard has been found dead.

These days, only 40 percent of calls made to debt-advice centers are answered. Sixty percent of the time the centers are so busy, the phone just rings and rings.

•   •   •

I PHONE BARCLAYS
to see if someone will talk to me about Richard Cullen.

“I don’t think anyone will comment on this at all,” says the first press officer I speak to. “Someone will get back to you but I really don’t think this is something we’ll be able to help you with.”

I ask the second press officer if there’s anything to be learned from Richard Cullen’s suicide. He says, “We did lend to Richard Cullen. That was clearly a poor decision. We should have shared data better within the bank. We did get it wrong with Richard Cullen. But we have learned from this. We are now sharing data better within the bank.”

Is Mosaic used within Barclays as a way to target certain people with junk?

“It is true to say that Mosaic and systems like Mosaic are used by the direct-marketing departments to make our marketing as efficient as possible,” he replies. “We want to get as few pieces of paper out as possible with the most number of responses. That is the very specific area in which we do use Mosaic—to target people who are likely to respond to direct mail.”

“And Mosaic pointers like ‘keen to take advantage of easy credit’?” I say.

“Yeah, we would see those as pointers,” he says. “However, this doesn’t mean that the credit-card companies will be willing to lend to that customer. Because we mail to someone in no way suggests that we are willing to lend to that person.”

The third Barclays press officer I speak to says the problem with Richard Cullen was that at the time he didn’t
seem
to be in trouble. He was making his repayments. What nobody knew—he says—was he was achieving this by borrowing on other cards.

“Richard Cullen should have asked for help,” he says.

Of course, he asked for help, repeatedly, with Debt Free Direct. But they were required by the creditors to make Richard Cullen jump through such complex hoops that they just couldn’t help him in time.

•   •   •

I CALL WENDY CULLEN
to see if there’s any news. She says things are bad. Some credit-card companies have written off the debts, for the sake of good public relations, but others haven’t. Morgan Stanley and the RBS, in particular, are being worryingly silent, she says. Wendy’s house, and her £500 car, and the trailer, remain at risk.

Just before I phoned, Wendy opened a letter from the credit-card company MBNA. She assumed it was about the debts. Richard had three MBNA cards and sheets of MBNA credit-card checks, which he used to pay his Goldfish minimum repayments. Wendy knows this because she found the stubs stuffed behind the washing machine a few days ago when it was pulled out for repairs. There they were, in Richard Cullen’s neat handwriting: “G/Fish £172.53.” And so on.

But the letter she received from MBNA today was something different. It read:

Dear Mr. Cullen

Let’s face it most of us encounter financial problems at some stage in our lives. All it takes sometimes is a little bit of bad luck.

The letter goes on to offer Richard Cullen, who has now been dead for three months, a £15,000 loan. (“10.9 percent APR variable. Loans are secured on residential property.”)

“Just imagine,” the letter concludes, “this could give you a much needed light at the end of that dark tunnel.”

In 2004, MBNA’s profits were one and a half times that of McDonald’s.

•   •   •

THE CULLENS
are beginning to piece together the minutiae of the mess Richard got himself into. They’ve found credit-card statements stuffed in drawers and behind wardrobes all over the house. Wendy says I can come down and look at them.

While I’m sitting there, I hear a key in the front door. It is Christopher.

“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 God!” 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 assistance, 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 passed 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 glass 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.”

I ask Peter, who runs the stand, how it works. He shows me a recent piece of junk mail from Capital One. It consists of an offer letter from the credit-card company outlining all the terms and technicalities, the APRs, and the extra charges. Stuck on the front is a bright-yellow Post-it note, which reads: