You must have an account to contact Chase

Is requiring an account number for phone or email communications with Chase an oversight that limits people doing the right thing?

One person with no Chase account started receiving deposit notification emails from Chase.  Probably someone entered the wrong email address, but what is a concerned citizen who wants to to the right thing do when Chase won’t accept communications without an account number.  No way to tell Chase about the problem.  Sigh.

Chase bill-pay over pays by $2,100! What?

Just how reliable is Chase online bill-pay?

This customer arranged two payments at one time on the online bill-pay screen, one to his bank for his mortgage and one to Verizon.  Chase sent both payments to Verizon.

To add insult to injury, he gets hung up on by Chase while getting transferred.

We’ve pointed out many times before where Chase has not been good at small technical details and this seems to be another such case.

On hold with Chase for over 4 hours

This customer was decided to document via YouTube how long he had been on hold with Chase, 280 minutes!

Chase lost paperwork and delayed response not limited to loan modification

Here is a recent experience by someone dealing with an insurance claim due to a burst water heater.  The insurance company paid the check immediately, but Chase dragged its feed and caused all kinds of problems.

On December 24, 2009 the water heater in my home went. There was 40 gallons of water on the first floor of my home. Called the insurance, GECO, and they were great about getting people out to help us. The claim was settled and the check issued at the end of February 2010.

Then we had to send the check to Chase Loss Draft Dept. That is where the nightmare began, and still continues, over 8 months later. The first time the claim was sent in (FEDEX) they claimed to never have received them. Then when I got proof of delivery, they claimed to only have received some of the papers that were enclosed.

I faxed everything to them a few days later. We were told that in 3 to 5 days we would have our money.

With that we start looking at kitchens, since that is where the majority of the damage happened. Mold was found in the walls that seperate the utility room from the kitchen. Everything in the kitchen had to be ripped out down to the studs in the wall.

We went to Ikea to get the kitchen. This way we could stay within our small budget. Submitted the papers to Chase and they said, again it would take another week or so to get the funds. The money never came.  Called them again. They claimed to not have the papers, AGAIN!

This kept happening over and over again. They lose EVERYTHING! Finally, in July, YES JULY, there was some repair work that had to be done by our homeowner association. The town building inspector came to see what was done, and we were told that our child could not live with us because we did not have a functioning kitchen. (we had no sink) He was going to write us up and in 30 days would have to start paying fines, also CPS would be called.  Told Chase about what they had done to us and the fines that they would have to pay…SURPRISE! Within 3 days our check showed up.

How are they allowed to operate like this?

For those of you not familiar with how this works, your insurance company issues the check in the name of you and the bank that holds your mortgage.  That is why the homeowner had to forward the check to Chase to actually get their money.

I did a little research and this type of problem with the Chase Loss Draft Department is not uncommon, all you have to do is search on “Chase Loss Draft Department.”

Chase changes debit card PINs with no warning or notice

We received this report from a reader today:

A couple of months ago, I tried using my debit card at a merchant and was told that the PIN was invalid.  I have two Chase cards so tried using the second and was told that that PIN was invalid as well.  I thought that I had made a mistake and forgot about it until a few days later when I was trying to deposit some checks and was unable to do so, again being told that the PIN was wrong.  Since I was at a branch, I went inside and had the PIN reset.  Yes, somehow, Chase had changed and re-set the PINs on both checking accounts!  I re-set the PINs but the PINs were then switched. Account A now had Account B’s PIN and vice versa (I mark the two cards so that I don’t mix them up).  I tried explaining this to my branch but they didn’t believe me.  No funds were missing but it really shook me up.

Chase is somewhat infamous for small technical screw-ups, at least according to all the stories we’ve come across.  Technical diligence doesn’t seem to be one of their strengths and this weeks 3-day outage has highlighted that in a big way.  The initial problem at least could be easily explained as a technical problem, but the reversing of the PIN numbers on the two cards probably not.

Or the initial problem could be explained another way.  Chase is also notorious for lack of communication.  When they change your credit card limit, they do it and send you a letter a month later.  When they have a major outage, they tell customers almost nothing.  When they take money from your account to satisfy an old debt that may or may not be valid, they say absolutely nothing.

Perhaps they thought they had some good reason for resetting the PIN numbers but felt communicating that was not important.

Chase online failure – after effects

The comments and Twitter are quiet about new problems so I think we can assume that the full (Monday, Tuesday) and partial (Wednesday) outages of Chase’s online banking are over for now.

The Wall Street Journal has a good article on the problems worth reading.

Chase’s biggest failure throughout this mess, and in its aftermath, is the failure to inform its customers what is going on.  First of all, they tried to pass it off as scheduled maintenance, in the middle of the day.  Then they didn’t officially acknowledge the problem, other than the notice on their site.  When problems reappeared on Wednesday, they were very slow to acknowledge them.

During the outage the very limited information they released did not indicate anything about the nature of the problem, how people might be ultimately affected, and how long the problem might last.  They failed to use the best possible channel to get any information to their customers, their website, to release information.

Lastly, since the problem was fixed, they have not come out with a clear explanation of the cause of the problem and what, if any, customer data or worse, funds, might be at risk, or have indicated that such a statement will be forthcoming.  The only information they provided to customers after the fact was a short apology and an incomplete description of what would happen to one type of transaction scheduled during the outage.

In short, this outage has been a complete communication failure for Chase as they left their customers completely in the dark.

We are getting a limited number of reports from people who are finding fraudulent activity in their accounts.  It is unclear at this time whether this might be a more widespread problem, whether this is normal fraud that is incorrectly being associated with the outage, or whether what appears to be fraudulent activity was caused by data corruption.

A short while ago they updated the message available from their main page from the previous short apology to a longer message similar to that which was available to customers once they logged in.  Here is the message:

We are sorry for the difficulties that recently affected Chase.com, and we apologize for not communicating better with you during this issue. Giving you 24-hour access to your banking is of the utmost importance to us. This was not the level of service we know you expect, and we will work hard to serve you better in the future and to communicate with you better if a situation like this should arise again.

Online Bill Payments scheduled for September 13, 14 or 15 were processed by Wednesday night, September 15. It is not necessary to reschedule these payments. If you scheduled a payment during those dates, but do not see it reflected in your payment activity by September 16, please contact us.

We will refund any late fees that you may have incurred as a result of our delay in processing your payment.

Thank you for your patience and for the opportunity to work harder to serve you in the future.

They are now additionally apologizing for the lack of communication and claiming to do better in the future.

This site (chase-sucks.org) was created in the hopes of helping convince Chase that they needed to do better at serving customers (more service, less shenanigans).  I can only hope that the black-eye this outage, and their response to it, has given Chase will truly convince them to do better for their customers.

Update Thursday 9/16/10:  Chase has not change the top banner on their main page to duplicate the apology link, as if saying it twice makes it carry more weight.  The apology text itself has not changed.

Update Saturday 9/18/10:  Here is a report from a customer saying their debit card stopped working as a results of the Chase outage:

I tried to use my debit card for an online transaction today and it was declined.  This immediately worried me given the problems they’ve been having, so I tried to withdraw money at an ATM.  An error message came up at the ATM saying that my card information was “incomplete.”  Whatever happened to their system has clearly scrambled their databases.  I live overseas and rely on my ATM card to access my money.  No working debit card=no way for me to get money, except for an expensive credit card advance.  The best part?  They are saying that they need four or five days to even get back to me on this.

Chase back up for good?

Sometime around 9 or 10 pm ET or so Chase online banking seems have stabilized, which we are estimating by when we got our first report in the comments and when the “Chase is down” tweets stopped.  Chase hasn’t provided an official time when the problem was fixed.

They have posted a short apology on their website but it contains no info on the cause of the problem:

To our customers:

Please accept our apology for the difficulties that recently affected Chase.com.

Giving you 24-hour access to your banking is of the utmost importance to us. This was not the level of service we know you expect.

Thank you for your patience and for the opportunity to work harder to serve you in the future.

Their spokesman released a brief statement about the nature of the problem:

“A third-party database company’s software caused a corruption of systems information, disabling our ability to process customer log-ins to chase.com. This resulted in a long recovery process,” Chase spokesman Thomas Kelly said Wednesday evening.

Clearly log ins were affected.  It remains to be seen whether reports of other fallout problems will surface when people start using the service in earnest on Thursday.  A more detailed statement was apparently available to customers once they logged in:

Please accept our apology for the difficulties that recently affected Chase.com.

Online Bill Payments scheduled for September 13, 14 or 15 have been processed or will be processed Wednesday night. It is not necessary to reschedule these payments. If you scheduled a payment during those dates, but do not see it reflected in your payment activity by September 16 please, contact us.

We will refund any late fees that you may have incurred as a result of our delay in processing your payment.

Giving you 24-hour access to your banking is of the utmost importance to us. This was not the level of service we know you expect.

Thank you for your patience and for the opportunity to work harder to serve you in the future.

It is also highly likely that the Chase’s online banking system will be getting higher than usual volume Thursday as people log in to check their accounts.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

Chase outage now at 48 hours

For Chase online banking customers the only news is the lack of news and specifically no new official statements (or any significant statements) from Chase as to the nature, severity, effects, and potential duration of the problem. For a blow-by-blow of today’s events, see our earlier post.

In the absence of any official statements by Chase, we have had to rely on unsubstantiated reports that we’ve seen in our comments and through Twitter.  One such tweet recently suggested a fairly severe problem:

Chase outage is a result of corruption to the database clusters containing customer online profiles (ie bil pay settings, usernames etc.).

Depending on the reliability of Chase’s backup system, this could result in some pretty inconvenient loss of data for customers.

The outage, which by our best estimates started sometime between 7-10 pm ET on Monday, and has included online banking being completely disabled/unavailable from Monday evening until early Wednesday morning, and sporadic and intermittent access since Wednesday morning, has now exceeded 48 hours and is believed by many to be the longest duration online banking outage for a bank of Chase’s size.