Chase Instant Action Alerts – LOL

We’ve reported a number of times about Chase’s supposedly helpful text and email alerts that warn customers when their balance goes below a certain threshold.  The problem many people have reported is that they texts are only sent at the end of the day, when all deposits and payments are processed together, so there is very little actual hope of avoiding an overdraft with these alerts.

Well, today is the first I heard that Chase actually has the gall to call those alerts “Instant Action,” as we all know they are far from it.  They are advertising them with banner ads like this one:

Clicking on the ad takes you to a marketing page for their Instant Action Alerts.  At the bottom is their description of how they work:

Alerts on checking and savings accounts will arrive each morning, Tuesday through Saturday, updating you on previous day’s activity. Alerts on credit card accounts will arrive each afternoon, Monday through Friday. Phone delivery time will be based on your area code and time zone.

Phone Alerts are not available for Chase Basic Checking^SM account.

There you have it, from the mouth of Chase itself.  If alerts are sent only once a day, and only alert you to the previous days activity, you have very little hope of actually avoiding any insufficient funds events.

Chase’s own catch-22

This came from a comment to one of our posts, but it is much to interesting to leave burried there.

Chase has been reading a lot of Kafka lately. Especially, the Castle, and they’re inspired!: There are lots of people caught in a terrible loop of Chase “losing Documentation” and making people continually re-send in forms for an MHA even after they are appoved for one by the gov’t. So we had a Chase bank mortgage specialist at a Chase bank fax all our forms for us but Chase still claims they didn’t receive all the required information and then demanded even more information not asked for on the application. Since we own and live in a duplex we must now send them proof we do not have not formed a homeowners association with our housemates, for example. But the real test of their devious cleverness is a scam based on their own bank statement paperwork. Please admire its Kafka-esque brilliance. On Chase bank statements they leave the last page “left intentionally blank” but they do not number this last page. For example, a Chase account may have 6 pages and all the pages say, i.e., 1 of 6, 2 of 6, but page 6, the blank one, is not numbered 6 of 6. we have been continually turned down for an MHA because we are not sending them, Chase- holder of our mortgage and the bank where we have our accounts- complete bank statements even though we do send them that 6th page. Since it doesn’t say 6 of 6 they claim our application isn’t complete and make us start over from the very beginning. Going on Month 7. Evidently that’s nothing, most people who have tried have been trying for twice this long. There is one recorded incidence of Chase approving an MHA but it was too late and the house was already in foreclosure…

Anyone see the movie Brazil?  That is just brilliant, don’t number your statements properly so that anyone sending them in as proof of a bank statement will have an incomplete statement.  Brilliant!

Chase has man jailed for trying to cash valid cashiers check

This is probably the most horrible thing I have heard come out of Chase’s inept culture.

When they purchased a home in 2006, Perez and Vargas obtained two loans from Chase’s predecessor, Washington Mutual Bank, including one loan in the amount of $312,000 secured by a first trust deed, and a second, home equity line of credit for $38,610 (the loan transactions). On February 6, 2008, Perez and Vargas withdrew $38,000 from the home equity line of credit, receiving a cashier’s check.

On November 6, 2008, Perez and Vargas presented the cashier’s check for payment at Chase’s National City branch. A branch employee informed Perez and Vargas that because the cashier’s check exceeded $10,000, cashing it in full would “require the bank to generate substantial paperwork” and cause a delay in receiving the funds which “could be avoided if the bank paid out $10,000 in cash and the balance in another bank check for $28,000.” Vargas and Perez were informed that to cash the $28,000 check that day, they “would have to go to three other banks and cash out each subsequent bank check in amounts of $10,000.00 or less at each bank.” Following the direction of the bank branch employee, Perez and Vargas cashed the $38,000 cashier’s check, receiving $10,000 in cash and a second cashier’s check in the amount of $28,000. Perez and Vargas proceeded to Chase’s Chula Vista branch, where they were given another $10,000 in cash and a third cashier’s check in the amount of $18,000.

Perez and Vargas then sought to cash the $18,000 cashier’s check at Chase’s Imperial Beach branch. According to declarations submitted by Chase, Perez presented the $18,000 cashier’s check to an operations supervisor, Nena Gelacio, who reviewed information on Chase’s computer system indicating that Perez’s account required investigation for “excess activity.” Gelacio became suspicious and asked Perez why he was attempting to cash a check that had been issued earlier in the day. Perez told Gelacio that he had cashed similar checks that day at Chase’s National City and Chula Vista branches. After receiving this information, Gelacio, the branch manager and assistant branch manager conducted an investigation and learned that in February 2008, Perez and Vargas had received a $38,000 check from the home equity line of credit account, which had not been cashed as of November 5, 2008, and that the account was closed in May 2008 and put “on collection.” The assistant branch manager called the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (Sheriff’s Department) and requested that the department “investigate a possible fraud committed against the Bank by Perez and Vargas.”

Sheriff’s Department deputies arrived, and the assistant branch manager told them that the bank believed that the $18,000 check Perez was attempting to cash was “drawn on funds from a closed account.” The deputies took possession of the cash held by Perez ($20,000) and the $18,000 cashier’s check, and arrested Perez. Perez was jailed for five days. The San Diego District Attorney’s Office later dropped all charges.

Did you get that?  The customer followed Chase’s advice and was ultimately jailed for it.

JP Morgan Chase gambles, loses $250M on obscure trade

Apparently JP Morgan Chase’s brilliant commodities traders lost $250 million on a single trade that bet on the differential prices between the costs associated with shipping coal in northwest Europe and the price of delivering coal in South Africa.

Nice job guys!

Guy tries to pay mortgage in full, Chase refuses

If you can read through all the legal jargon, this is an interesting story.

It is hard to understand all the back story, but what is clear is that at some point, Robert Traversari wanted to write a check to pay his entire mortgage (some $150,000) off in full.  So he wrote Chase a personal check for the full amount.

Chase refused the payment saying that it was their policy that payments over $5,000 needed to be presented as a certified check.  They foreclosed or tried to foreclose and promptly got sued by Mr. Traversari.

The major discrepancy is that the mortgage was acquired by Chase from another bank and the original mortgage said nothing about payments over a certain amount needing to be presented in a certified check.

This has to make us wonder whether Chase really just wanted to take possession of the house and had no interest in following the rules.

I hereby nominate Chase for the asshole of the month club.

Chase billboards show how clueless they are

I’ve lives in San Francisco, famous for its fog, and now live south of the city on the peninsula, where fog is not an issue.  Still Chase puts up billboards in my area touting how you can find a branch even through the fog, clearly showing they don’t have a clue about geography or local climate.

I came across a report of another billboard, this in actually in San Francisco.

Why would Chase Bank put a billboard in Chinese up in Cow Hollow?

China Town is all the way over the hill.

Impossible to stop Chase automatic payments

This is so stupid of Chase I am laughing out loud.  A Chase customer set up automatic payments for their car loan, but when the car loan was fully paid off, they found it impossible to cancel the automatic payments.  The Chase employee they spoke to said the only way to cancel an automatic payment is to pay the stop payment fee, presumably for every single future payment as they go on indefinitely.

Chase rips off yet another customer

I’ve seen TONS of reports whereby Chase simply takes money out of someones account (with a notation like “transferred to another account”) to satisfy an old debt, typically at an organization that Chase has swallowed.  They never give anyone warning and don’t send any kind of letter explaining what happened.  Well, here is another one, with the twist that the “old debt” is due to Chase screwing up.

Here’s the story: In April of 2008, I opened a WAMU account because I
was in San Fran (And they had awesome saving rates of 5%). I was happy
with the account until I was getting ready to move back to Michigan
where there is not a single WAMU around (This was just before the big
banking blow up and Wamu’s takeover by Chase). I went into the WAMU
branch, and closed both of my accounts since dealing with a bank you
have no access to is a pain, and ATM fees are killers.

Fast forward to around October of last year. I hadn’t had a bank
account since I closed up my WAMU account so I decided to go to Chase
since my parents have used them for years and years and have never had
a problem. I hadn’t had any problems either, until today.

So today I go on my online account and notice a rather strange
withdrawal of near a thousand dollars with a description of
“Transfered to another account”. Now, after having had my WoW account
hacked I thought at first that someone got into my account online at
Chase, and moved some money. I looked over all the transfer logs, and
saw nothing of interest.

Call up Chase. Get through to a representative finally, and say “Hey,
I noticed this almost thousand dollar transfer, and wonder what’s up.”
So, first time, they go to check, I get disconnected. Call again get
someone else. They again go off and check on it, and come back saying
“Well, that was money you owed WAMU”. Now that’s odd, a bank account I
closed with a 0 balance and I owed them money. The rep then went on to
tell me the account was closed in April of 09…however I had closed
the account in November/December of 08. Odd.

I finally get them to fax the statement over to prove that I somehow
owed this money. The fees were all overdraft (Up to 3 a week mind you
of 35 bucks a piece) on fees that Chase was charging to the account
labelled “Maintenance Fee”. Apparently, my account came back to life
like some bank account zombie, and ate my lunch…and rent…and cable
payment…and gas and electric as well. To top all that off, despite
having two addresses on file, an email address, and two phone numbers,
they couldn’t be arsed enough to tell me that my account was over
drafted (And no, I didn’t have any access to WAMU’s online system
since the accounts were closed). I went on to call my roommate in San
Fran, since he still lives in the cottage, and he told me nothing had
come for me since I left.