Got credit card debt? If so, good news: the card issuer can no longer hike your interest rate without warning or raise rates on an existing balance. They have to send your bill at least 21 days before it’s due (up from 14 days). And each bill has to show how long it will take to pay off the balance if you make the minimum payment–and how much you’ll pay in interest if you do that. Call it the credit card equivalent of the Surgeon General’s warning.

These reforms–and many others–are due to a single new law, the Credit CARD Act, which came into effect last month. Great! Who hasn’t been surprised by one or more of these practices?

“This new law is good, and it does stop a lot of bad things,” says Kathleen Day of the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer watchdog group which published a handy guide to the new law. “But it doesn’t stop everything, and you know they’re going to find new ways around it.”

Why do the card issuers play these games? It’s not because they’re jerks and like watching you suffer. (That’s a side benefit.) They do it to make money. Take away these revenue streams, and the card companies aren’t going to roll over. Right now they’re rubbing their hands together and coming up with new schemes.

Let’s be like the writers on 24 who sit around coming up with hypothetical terrorist attacks, and figure out what the credit card issuers are going do next.

A crackdown on deadbeats

A deadbeat dad is one who never pays his child support on time. But to a credit card issuer, a deadbeat is just the opposite: a customer who always pays on time and therefore never pays any interest.

Interest is the single biggest chunk of credit card profits. The card issuers have always done their best to turn deadbeats into debtors. Got a pesky customer who always pays on time? Make sure their bill arrives a few days before it’s due, then, when they pay late, slap a 30 percent penalty APR on their entire balance.

The CARD Act makes it harder to pull this maneuver off: they have to send you the bill earlier, and you have to be 60 days late before they can jack your APR. But you can still blow it the old-fashioned way: occasionally pay less than the balance due.

“The house is making a bet that you will not live up to your intentions,” says Chris Farrell, author of The New Frugality and economics editor at American Public Media’s weekly radio show Marketplace Money. “If you will pay it off at the end of the month, and you can pay it off at the end of the month, and you actually have that discipline, it’s a really good deal. The strategy doesn’t work if it turns out you do it every other month.”

If you do show steely discipline and pay in full consistently, the card issuer is now likely to reward you by lowering your credit limit or canceling your account. Happy trails.

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