I have a very low opinion of credit card companies that aren't named "American Express."

A Brookline man is taking on banking behemoth Bank of America, saying that the bank tried to dupe him into paying his late mother’s credit card bill.

“People are already going through so much when family members die, the last thing they need is to be taken advantage of in this way,” Paul Kelleher said about the Internet offensive he launched last week.

Theresa Hatt, Kelleher’s mother, died in late January of cancer at age 52. She had spent her life working a variety of jobs, and raising two sons in southern Maine. When she died, she had nine different credit cards, and owed about $1,000 on each card.

If she had left an estate, her debts would have to be paid before her heirs received any inheritance. But Hatt left little behind, except for her relatively small amount of unpaid debt. ...

According to Kelleher’s version, after he told the bank representative that his mother had died, the Bank of America worker said his mother had never missed a payment, and then asked, “How are you planning to take care of her balance?”

Kelleher said he wasn’t going to.

“She has no estate to speak of,” he said, “but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.”

“You mean you’re not going to help her out?” the representative responded.

Kelleher replied, “I wouldn’t be helping her out - she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.”

“Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it,” the bank representative reportedly told him.

“I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.” [Emphasis added.]

“That’s when I lost it,” Kelleher told the Herald on Friday.

“She was implying that I would be betraying the dutiful woman that my mother was, by not making the final payment to keep her on the up and up,” he said.

“People die sometimes and banks have to know that this is a cost of doing business,” he said, “so to blame this economic crisis on people who have modest credit limits is absurd.

“And to blame it on family members who are unwilling to take on the debts of family members who are deceased is so unfair,” he added.