Credit card companies' evil tricks

By Liz Pulliam Weston

Parents spend the first several years of children's lives teaching them how to play fair. By the time we hit elementary school, most of us are pretty good at knowing what's just and what's not.

That sense of fair versus foul, though, tends to get tangled up in the world of credit cards. Some practices that seem egregious at first glance actually make sense when you understand their rationale. Other policies don't hold up so well to scrutiny, even though they're widely accepted in the industry.

What makes matters more complicated is that a few credit card issuers are bad to the bone. Some of the companies that have the most consumer-friendly practices in one area turn around and punish their customers unfairly in another.

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