It's amazing what damage a typo can do.

I pay most of our bills through my bank's online bill pay feature. When entering in one of the credit card account numbers (while setting up the account to be paid) I inverted the last two numbers, instead of 06 I put 60.

Needless to say, they didn't credit the $500 payment to the credit card account.

Okay fine, my fault. DH calls the CC company to explain what happened and ask what to do. The India call center rep at first didn't understand what "online bill payments" were, DH spent 20 minutes explaining. After we established that the payment had the wrong account number on it, the rep said "sorry, tough luck your our the money" DH said, uh no we aren't, you have our money, we just need to get it credited to our account. The rep then said "Well look into it and send you a letter with our findings and what, if anything, we'll do about it." Yeah right!

So, I call my bank and tell them the problem. They are much more helpful (I love my local non-conglomerate bank!) and they get in touch with the thrid party company that actually processes the payments for my bank and sends them to the various places that need to be paid. That company will work with my bank and the credit card company to track down where the money went and either get it credited to our account, or reverse the payment and get us our money back so we can re-send it (with the right account number this time!).

Meanwhile we just have to make the minimum payment to keep the account current.

But oh, what a headache this is! The good news is that my balance transfers to consolodate the debt on our other credit cards to a single account went through, so all our CC debt is now in one place at 0% interest for 12 months. (The CC I described above with the payment problem is my DH's card and gets paid off every month, so that's why it wasn't transfered with the others). Now we can concentrate on getting that paid down ASAP. I'm hoping that once the 12 months is up I can transfer it again to another 0% offer.