Word: mastercard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Indulgences (no relation here to bubble baths or truffles) have been part of Catholic doctrine since the Crusades. When the Church offered them for sale in the 1500s - call it mercy for money - religious reformer Martin Luther protested. These days, they can't be bought. "How does that MasterCard ad go?" muses Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "Some things are priceless." (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI visiting...
Better Best Western. If your company is cutting back on premium hotel stays for business travel, keep in mind that you can stay at any Best Western hotel from now through Feb. 14 and earn up to quadruple points when you pay with a MasterCard. That means, if you join Best Western Rewards, you may be able to earn a free stay after just four nights. Plus, this isn't your father's Best Western: Many hotels now have 42-inch flat-screen TVs in the rooms, with nary a polyester quilted bedspread in sight. Pretty luxe for the price...
...Hence, the growing trend toward more arcane and occasionally bizarre password retrieval questions. Sign up for an MSN/Hotmail account and you can choose from "Who was your best childhood friend?" "What was your grandfather's occupation?" or "Who is your favorite historical person?" The questions for a Citibank MasterCard account are even odder, bordering on the absurd: "Who was your archrival growing up?" "If you needed a new first name, what would it be?" and "If you could control your height, how tall would you be?" Even if a person can answer those questions, there's no guarantee the answer...
...road. Indeed, among respondents in the Sallie Mae/Gallup poll who said they were using credit cards to pay tuition bills, no parents and only 15% of students said they were doing so because they thought they'd get a better interest rate. Nearly half reported using Visa or MasterCard to finance their education because they had no alternative. Some 3% of survey respondents said they have resorted to withdrawing money early from retirement savings, which can carry up to a 10% penalty...
Starting in 2000, the IRS went after records from American Express, MasterCard and Visa to track the spending of U.S. citizens using credit cards issued in Antigua, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, leading to hundreds of audits and criminal investigations. In a landmark 2005 case, the accounting firm KPMG admitted its employees had criminally generated at least $11 billion in phony tax losses, often routed through the Cayman Islands, which cost the U.S. $2.5 billion in tax revenue...