06/23/2004
I found out today that a co-worker also got called by American Express yesterday telling him his accounts were suspended until he handed over the same financial documents they demanded from me. Like myself, he has a great credit rating, never made a late payment or missed a payment. He is however from the same area of the world my family is from -- Southern Asia (India, Bangladesh, etc.)
06/22/2004
I just came across an old article published by City Limits on Muslim New Yorkers having their credit cards cancelled. I was searching the internet after being called by American Express telling me that they have suspended my account and I will need to submit my past 3 consecutive bank statements along with last year's tax return and W2 in order to get the flag lifted. If I did not comply within 15 days, my cards would be cancelled.
This rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't want to think it, but I felt I was being targeted for being a Muslim. I've never missed or made a late payment. In fact, I just checked my credit report a month ago and it was clean -- American Express reported "Paid/Never Late". I then decided to do a search on Google when I found this City Limits article along with others reporting similar incidents.
I think I'm going to cancel my cards and just move on. It just frustrates me. I'm an US citizen by birth. I pay my taxes. I obey the law. Why do I have to prove I'm innocent? Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? Why am I being punished for doing nothing wrong? *sigh*
I'm curious if anyone else has gone through this. Email me at mhaque<a>haque.net (replace <a> with @).
Other articles:
10/23/2003
So I did some war-driving (actually, war-riding since DShadow was doing the driving) on the way home from work. 159 hits!!!
Some stats...
- Only 49 had WEP enabled.
- 36 had SSID set to 'linksys'
- Funniest SSID: Daddy's lil' girl
- Cryptic SSID: ts#^n9.0e8*
The saddest thing about the whole thing was that the Apple Airport card in my machine only caught 15 of the 159. The other card is a Macsense AeroCard Plus. Though it's really not a fair comparison. I was using MacStumbler with the Airport card which wouldn't pick up any hidden networks. KisMac on the other hand uses passive scanning so it picked up any wireless traffic to determine if there was a network to be found. Read O'Reilly Network: Passive Scanning with KisMAC for more information why the two scan differently. KisMac does work with Airport card but it won't scan using both cards simultaneously.
