Nextcard Merrick Bank unfair apr increase Old Bethpage New York

I was a good Nextcard customer... always paid on time, had a 9.9% APR. The last month before Merrick took over, September 2002 I believe, my APR suddenly rose to 27.99 without notice!! An outrageous APR, I would never willingly get a credit card with such a rate.. i don't need a card THAT bad. Since my balance was near limit, I went over limit with the unexpected triple amount in finance charges. I emailed Next card through their website and told them that this was outrageous and to either give the 9.9% rate back or close my account. The proceeded to do both.. close the account AND lowered the rate to 9.9% and also credited the over liimit charge. I was okay with this, since I knew their was soon to be a new bank in control and who knew what they would do.

SO, then here comes October.. and low and behold I receive a statement from Merrick with the 27.9% rate!!!!
I called them to complain.. and the 'customer service' guy check my nextcard history and said that my APR was 27.9 now because I showed an over limit in September. I explained the whole situation to him.. but it didn't do a bit of good. I guess since I had already closed my account, they weren't motivated in any way to please me.

There is a lot more to this but I won't bore you with details. What I want to know is.. is there ANYTHING I can do about this???

I'm paying my payments on time and every extra $1 I get will go on this card to get rid of it once and for all. But, in the mean time I'm paying outrageous finance charges that make it very difficult to pay off quickly.

Tess
Conway, Arkansas