Have you received a credit card mail offers with annual fees return?

Data collected by research firm Synovate showed that while fewer Americans are receiving offers for credit cards this year, more of them are coming with an annual fee. 

Mail Monitor, the mail tracking service for Synovates, retrieved that Americans had received 372.4 million card offers during the first quarter of 2009 (a 67 percent decrease from the 1.132 last year). 27 percent of them have been discovered to carry a fee, against 18 percent in the same period of 2008. 

Andrew Davidson, Vice President of Competitive Tracking Services for Synovate's Financial Services Group, explained the rise in fee-based offers as a way of offsetting the overall decreased amount of offers made. Some other reasons to increase might have been issuers' increasing reliance on co-branded airline rewards cards typically carrying an annual fee, and a move toward a fee-based model in anticipation of the now-approved Credit CARD Act of 2009. 

It should also be noted that President Barack Obama had signed a bill on May 22 aimed at establishing fairer practices by credit agencies, including protections against arbitrary interest rate increases.