By Catherine Austin Fitts
At Solari, we watch our vendor and financial accounts like a hawk. We find it is the only way to stop a contagion of mistakes, frauds and scams that just keep growing throughout the economy.
Today, one of our team members was finding and reversing a series of fraudulent credit card charges over the last three days. Each was $25. These are the kinds of charges that the fraudsters hope are too small to be noticed. We notice because we find letting these slip is a prelude to more, larger charges.
We made a command decision to cancel the card and arrange for a new card. Dealing with this, then accounting for and distributing the new cards and changing existing subscriptions will take 5 to 10 staff hours.
Then, an hour later, we discovered that the corporate motel where I am staying in California has decided to charge $25 per day for incidentals. They are proposing to charge $25 per day for weeks on a cumulative basis. This balance is now growing towards over $500. They are also charging for the incidentals daily. A movie is $16.98 plus tax. One long distance call was $30. Then when I leave, they say they will credit back $500 plus.
Since I did not agree to provide short term financing to the company, I will have the phone, TV, Internet and room service turned off for my room, then see about the deposit. The Solari bookkeeper spent an hour running this down today. I will spend more time tomorrow. Figure 2 staff hours and then more if I need to go further to get this changed.
The last two times I stayed in this area, I tried to find non-corporate residential solutions, they did not work. So this time I went through Priceline and landed in this corporate chain. I should know better than to trust a large corporate provider.
Since I was doing The Solari Report tonight from the motel and it appears that a long distance call for 90 minutes was going to be quite expensive, I decided to get a phone card at Rite Aid on the way home. I always have three phones for The Solari Report – so a phone plus two backups. That was lucky, because the phone card did not work and I was not prepared to forego an ounce of gold to use the hotel phone without it.
I bought a 350 minutes card for $20. I called the bridge line tonight and was informed after the initial number connected that I had 290 minutes remaining. That means the connect fee was 60 minutes for the first call. Then it turns out the access number for the bridge line will not work with the phone card. So the phone card was worthless for this purpose. Count .75 staff hour wasted to stop at Rite Aid, buy the Prepaid Long Distance Rite Aid Phone Card, account for the purchasing of the card and to get the card working. I am sure I will use it again — if the connect fees don’t wipe out all the minutes just by making a small number of calls to people who are not available.
Solari has a GREAT team. We swarm through these issues each day with a great attitude and making things happen despite the waste of our time and resources. We pinch pennies and watch pennies, so that the skims and scams are minimized. Nevertheless, sometimes I have to shake my head and wonder how in the world our culture manages to get anything done.
Welcome to a world at war, $20 and $25 dollars at a time.
