Here is a great story that outlines exactly the tendency of Chase’s customer service to give incomplete or simply bad information.
How Chase Bank Almost Helped a Teenager Get Scammed
by Jeff Sovern
A teenager I know responded to a listing for a summer job on Craig’s List. The employer claimed he was opening an art gallery and would pay $400 a week for twelve hours of work running errands and the like. Because he was out of the country, he was unable to meet her, but emailed her a list of questions. Upon receiving her answers, he hired her. She was thrilled.
Shortly afterwards, he overnighted her two money orders totaling $1,700. He instructed her to deposit them and take $200 for half of her first week’s salary; she was to wire the remaining $1,500 to an artist that day. When she mentioned this to me, I became concerned. What if she wired the money and the money orders later came back dishonored? And why hadn’t he wired the money himself rather than trusting a teenager he had never met?
So she called her bank–JPMorgan Chase–to find out how long it would take before the money orders cleared. The answer she received was one day. That didn’t sound right to me, so I got on the phone. I explained my concern that this was a scam and that I didn’t want to know when she could draw on the funds, but rather when the funds would clear so that she was assured that the bank would not charge back her account when the money orders came back dishonored. Once again, I was told one day. I was still unconvinced, so we called again. Again we were told one day. I haven’t looked at check clearing for ages; had things changed so much in the interval? I tried a third call to Chase, and this time the representative told me what I had expected to hear the first time: while Chase would make the funds available in one business day, it could take much longer than that to determine if the money order was legitimate and that if it were dishonored, Chase would charge back the account. I instructed the teenager to text the employer that she would not wire the funds until the money orders had cleared, on the theory that if he’s legitimate, he will get in touch with her. So far, she hasn’t heard back. I don’t think she will.
The teenager is disappointed at the loss of her seeming summer job and simultaneously relieved at not having lost her savings. But there’s a bigger issue here than just what happened to her. Most teenagers–and probably most adults–would have stopped at the first phone call. Many would have wired the money. Maybe they could later persuade Chase that it should not charge their account back for the dishonored money order because of the information provided by its customer service agent, but more likely they wouldn’t be able to. Chase was in a position to prevent this fraud–and it didn’t.
First of all, I am simply shocked that Chase would make any deposited funds available that quickly. Their tendency has been to stretch out the hold period longer and longer where now it is often 7-10 days. Second, the customer asked, how long until the check clears, not how long until funds are available. When talking with Chase, you may find it valuable to ask questions in two or three different ways, and perhaps with at least two different people, just to make sure you get the same answer each time.
Yet another story of a bank integration gone bad. A customer had an account with Great Western Bank which was integrated into WaMu. Great. Then Chase takes over WaMu and the customers account gets combined with an ex-boyfriends that she hasn’t been with in over 15 years! Perfectly failing in the small details.
But it wouldn’t be a Chase story if there wasn’t a quite a bit of Chase refusing to see and/or fix the problem which this story has plenty of.
Over 15 years ago I had a Chase money market/credit card account. It was a joint account with my boyfriend at the time. We split up in 1994, at which point I opened my own account at Great Western Bank and took my name off of the joint Chase account. Great Western became Wamu, and my Great Western checking account became a Wamu checking account.
Then in 2009, when Chase took over Wamu, my Wamu checking account became a Chase checking account. In about March of 2010 I started receiving email addressed to my ex-boyfriend at my own email account. In other words, I started receiving email from Chase addressed to a man I hadn’t lived with in over 15 years! I went online and noticed a credit card account that I’d never seen before! I called Chase and they told me it was a credit card in my ex’s name. They told me they couldn’t cancel the credit card because I was not the primary account holder. They would not let me take my name off of the account myself and instead sent me a form that they required my ex to fill out.
My ex contacted them and they told him they’d already closed the credit card account per my request (although they had not told ME they’d closed the account). At about this time I started to received hardcopy mail addressed to my ex at my own house, where my ex had never lived! One letter contained two new Chase credit cards, one with my name on it and one with his name. My online sessions still showed the “canceled” credit card account as one of my active accounts. I also started getting junk mail addressed to my ex — Amex solicitations and such. I called and emailed Chase to tell them that something must have corrupted the data for my account when they took over Wamu, but the Chase reps I talked to said that couldn’t have happened.
Meanwhile, I’d been using Wamu’s online bill-pay, which of course turned into Chase’s online bill-pay. Yesterday I was contacted by one of my payees, who told me the check he received had my name and a suspicious address printed on it. Guess what? It was my ex’s current house address!!! Apparently, the bill-pay checks that my payees have been receiving since Chase took over Wamu have all had my ex-boyfriend’s address printed on them!
Today I got off the phone with a Chase rep who said they will research my bill-pay payments and send me a list of payees who received checks with invalid addresses. (I could research that myself online, but it would require about 5 clicks per check to see what addressed was printed on them.) Now I am going to have to contact each of those payees to make sure they haven’t updated their records and replaced my house address with my ex’s, and that they haven’t been sending my bills to my ex’s house.
If you pay a mortgage, or any type of loan payment for that matter, you know, there is the due date, and the date after which a payment is considered late. For instance, my mortgage is due on the 1st of each month, but isn’t considered late until after the 16th.
I often pay after the 1st of the month (but before the 16th) and have never heard a complaint from my bank about this. After all, why would I, the payment isn’t late.
Why then is Chase harassing this customer with daily phone calls after the 1st but before the payment is actually due later in the month? Can they not figure out their own late payment date?
My wife and I have been sad Mortgage holders with Chase by accident.. We had a WAMU mortgage back in 96 that was transfered after the big mess and failure of WAMU. We have never been late with them, just on time before they could sick fees on us. The mortage is due on the 1st of course but the late fee is not assessed until the 16th. We purposely setup auto transfer of our payment for the 14th of the month before the payment is considered late. They seem to think that we need to be reminded every day after the 1st that our payment is due. We remind them that it is not late and no late fee is due. We pay the stupid mortgage unlike some of our friends and neighbors albeit just in time every month.. They seem to think that having some one call every day at least once literally to remind us starting on the 1st or the 2nd is appropriate and good business behavior. Even telling them we have it set up on the 14th does not work. They will call several times a day. Sadly I believe we will find some reason to sue them or do a strategic default since even paying the mortgage is not good enough for them. The people that call have meager english skills also and i believe my 5 year old could do better at calling people.
Point is Chase is obnoxious and even our second loan Ocwen does not even harass us.. Sad is that even Ocwen is smart enough to leave us alone since we pay consistently but Chase is not. If we default we will pay Ocwen and screw Chase if we can… Sad to say we will need to turn off the home phone or change our number because of Chase even though we are not deadbeats, work our asses off to fulfill the foolish committment we made while watching our neighbors buy new cars, take nice trips and not have to pay rent or mortgage for over a year.. Chase sucks and deserves some more bad loans….
Update: Here is another report of this same thing. Seriously, what are they trying to accomplish? I think this could be a great opportunity to mess with the Chase customer service people, like, “Hold on a sec” and then just set the phone down, or do some telemarketer pranks like comedian Jim Florentine does.
Think again. According to a lawsuit filed by a Seattle business owner, a bank error made by Chase during the holidays resulted in Chase freezing his accounts which ultimately forced him out of business.
Whether or not Chase made an error is not in question. Chase has formally admitted to the error and the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates Chase, has also determined that Chase made an error. The business owners account was put on hold incorrectly, and it took a week to get it open again, a week that turned out to be the worst possible time for the business.
While the new Chase iPhone app has been widely reported on by the (mostly tech) media, Chase’s website, and specifically their mobile banking information page, still doesn’t show any information, so it is hard to find information directly from Chase on the capabilities an deficiencies of their new app.
According to this article, Chase has limited the deposits to $1,000 per day through the iPhone app, and a maximum of $3,00o per week. Checks larger than those amounts must still be taken into a branch. The article also reports that the app relies on the same technology used in the envelope-free ATM’s that scan the checks to get the deposit amount. This technology has proven to sometimes fail to read the information properly, in which case Chase simply mails the check back to the customer, which adds many days onto the deposit process.
What will they do when an iPhone picture of a check isn’t able to be properly read? Nothing?
Even their description in the iTunes App Store doesn’t give the full details. App Store reviews list the following problems people have had:
- Unable to activate the app
- Inability to edit payments
- Inability for some customers to find the quick deposit feature (problem with iOS 4?)
- Not upgraded for the current iOS version
- Inability to pay certain bills (mortgage or HELOC)
- Can’t deposit using an iPod Touch
- Difficulty with rebate checks
I could go on. Overall, the rating of the app went down over the previous version.
I appreciate that Chase is trying here, I really do. But perhaps more important than technological bells and whistles, would be more competent customer support and less bilking of customers with ridiculous fees.
Update: A recent report of problems with the app crashing.
This is a strange story but it sure sounds like something Chase would do. First, a little background. The percentage of people who apply for a loan modification with Chase is large, and the number that get them, is small. This might be partially due to the fact that standard operating procedures for Chase loan modifications is for them to lose your paperwork multiple times, causing you to resubmit. This sounds suspiciously similar to some insurance companies who automatically deny a claim the first time it is submitted.
So, when Robert Davis actually was approved for a permanent loan modification, it was such an anomaly that a news program did a big story on him, profiling his tortuous path to getting approved.
Happy ending to the story, right?
Not quite.
It seems that Chase now claims that he himself requested that his loan modification be canceled. They also claim that they never received the final paperwork, despite Davis’ Fed-ex tracking that says it was delivered and phone calls to Chase employees who claimed the paperwork had been received.
So where does that leave him? Chase is now requesting that he begin the process all over again.
Simply astounding that Chase could screw up this badly.
Chase has released a new iPhone app that allows you to take pictures of checks to deposit them directly through the app.
That sounds neat, but I shudder at the implications of Chase screwing this up on the back end. They haven’t seemed the most tech-competent of banks in the past.
I just came across the website mybanktracker.com which has quite a few Chase reviews. Guess what people think of Chase on that site?
We’ve reported a number of times on Yelp reviews for Chase branches, most of which are pretty low, but this is the first countrywide review for Chase bank I’ve seen. Not a very good rating. Also shocking is MyBankTracker’s bank health estimation, which is not exactly stellar.
Here is a great story that outlines exactly the tendency of Chase’s customer service to give incomplete or simply bad information.
Customer service, Ineptitude | admin July 16, 2010 | 
Comments (1) 
