Capital One has backed down! For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with this, here last week’s report of the threatening letter from RSA on behalf of Capital One that almost got our hosting company to pull the plug on the Saverocity blogs.
On Friday I heard back from Pam Girardo, who works in PR at Capital One. She wrote:
…We were obviously upset to hear about your experience, and want to assure you that Capital One is in no way attempting to remove our name/assets from all blogs. To the contrary, we proactively reach out to bloggers like yourself to ensure you are aware of what we’re up to over here, and we appreciate it when you find it interesting enough to share with your readers and followers.
To that end, we’ve spoken with our Information Security guys and they are talking to RSA about what happened here. As you know from the notice they sent, RSA is working on Capital One’s behalf to find phishing scams and attempts to fraudulently steal customer information. I’ve asked for an explanation as to how a site like yours got caught in their net.
I’ll follow up when I learn more. In the mean time, please know that we are not attempting to remove editorial content from news sites and blogs, and I sincerely apologize for the confusion.
Fair enough. Thanks to Pam for responding and letting us know we’re in the clear. As somebody who’s worked for my share of large companies, I know that sometime they do bad things that no individual really wanted to have happen, but they happen anyway. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Of course, when something bad does happen, it’s not always easy to find somebody with both the will and ability to fix the problem. So the lesson here is that if you find yourself victimized by a large company in some way, raise hell and try to get connected to the right person.
Several bloggers also linked to the story–many thanks to View From The Wing, Travel Blogger Buzz, and FreequentFlyer. And thanks to VFTW, our story was also noticed by constitutional law scholar Randy Barnett, so in the off chance he’s reading, thanks Randy!
Finally, thanks to all of you who continue to read this blog and the other fine blogs at Saverocity. Between the great deals and the Great Capital One Kerfuffle of 2014, it’s been quite a year, has it not?
Congrats! Hopefully the press the blog got and the good you did by going public (and perhaps helping other bloggers similarly targeted) will make the inconvenience worth it.
Congrats! And I figured some scammer did something and somehow his actions cross referenced your site, so C 1 somehow thought you were a part of it. Stupid of them, but glad they figured it out and that you were not a problem.
You should still refer to them as Crapital One. Any company that requires three hard pulls isn’t worth supporting.
Thanks Elaine! Let’s hope so.
It’s hard for me to stay mad at banks, given that I have a beneficial relationship with most of them.
Yeah, I’m curious as to whether I’ll hear any further explanation.
Congrats on getting the resolution for this nightmare.
Thanks Andy!