4 million BofA’s customers to see their credit card rates increase

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bank of America will increase interest rates on as many as four million U.S. credit-card customers who carry a balance. The bank will raise the rates into the double digits to those customers who have their interest rates below 10% starting with June account statements.

Meantime a spokeswoman for Bank of America said that the measure will be applied to less than 10% of the bank’s customers in the U.S. The journal notes that BofA has about 70 million card holders across the globe while the number of its customers in the U.S. remains unknown.

“The increase on these accounts reflects the current economic conditions where our cost of providing credit has significantly increased,” the spokeswoman told the newspaper.

While the government passed the legislation to prevent banks’ from raising credit card interest rates the banks go on tightening consumers’ finances as long as the law will come into effect only after July 2010.