Chase online banking down for 14 hours now

I’ve been updating the original post on this story regularly.  Here is an update for those of you following on RSS and Twitter.

Chase’s online banking has been down since around 4 pm PT/7pm ET yesterday, 14 hours so far.  Originally, they put up a message that they were down for scheduled maintenance but around 12:30 am PT/3:30 ET probably realized that was fairly unbelievable and changed the message on their main page to reflect the more unplanned nature of the outage. We have not received reports yet on whether this is affecting their other banking operations.

Stay tuned.

Chase online down again – UNSCHEDULED!

Chase online appears to be experiencing some unscheduled downtime again, despite what their website says.  I just received this from a reader:

9-13-2010  9:45 p.m (central time?)

Online Banking for Chase customers has been disrupted, again, for the second time in as many weeks.

This outage has been ongoing for well over two hours thus far.

No previous mention of this outage was posted on Chase.com’s main page and no e-mail was sent to Chase Online’s customer base informing them of any “scheduled maintenance.”

Interestingly, the notification message at https://chaseonline.chase.com has changed during this outage to try and classify this OUTAGE as “scheduled maintenance.”

Funny, you can only contact Chase’s online customer service by first LOGGING INTO YOUR ACCOUNT.  This activity is instantly greeted with the same “This website is temporarily unavailable” page.

I have e-mailed the editors over at The Wall Street Journal.  We’ll see if they decide to pick-up this story and run with it or if they let Chase’s flack tell them it was a planned outage for “system maintenance.”

How long will this Outage last?  Will this continue into normal business hours tomorrow?  How long will Chase customers be inconvenienced this time?  Does Chase care?  Do Chase’s shareholders care?

Stay tuned…

According to our reader, this started around 6 pm Pacific time on a weekday, a highly unlikely time for a scheduled maintenance.  Once again Chase is not giving us the straight story.

Update 11:50 pm. According to comments we’ve received, Chase was down as early as 4 pm, making this about an 8 hour unscheduled outage so far.  The image on Chase’s website (see above) claims this is due to “scheduled maintenance” but the image itself is called “defaultHomeOutageImage.gif”.  Looks like the Chase website developers are a little more honest than they should have been.

Couple brings car loan current, Chase reposesses anyways

I’ve wondered for a while now, given all the bad behavior from Chase I see, whether they are inept or malicious.  I am beginning to lean towards malicious and this next story is another strike in that direction.

In short, it appears that Chase told a couple that if they brought their loan current, their car would not be repossessed.  The couple came in and paid their loan current, and that evening Chase had their car reposssessed.

This seems very similar to what Chase has been doing with people late on their mortgages, telling them to keep paying a trial modification all the while working on foreclosure in parallel.  It all just seems like Chase’s standard operating procedure for getting more money out of customers any way they can, even if they have to lie to do it.

JPMorgan Chase’s economic prognostication

JPMorgan Chase’s senior economist commented recently that he believes the economic recovery is on track.  As part of the justification for this belief, Chase gives this information:

Robert F. Ryan, Chase region executive for western New York, said the bank is seeing greater use of commercial credit by clients. It means businesses are ramping up spending and investing, he said, a positive economic sign.

I do see one small problem with that.

Chase has been hounding ordinary non- business customers for a while now to switch from regular credit cards to their Ink credit card, a professional business card.  As many small-business owners know, much small-business financing is done through credit cards.  Small businesses have had a particularly hard time in the recession because banks like Chase cut their credit lines severely, cutting them off from the credit they needed to run their day-to-day operations and in many cases, expand.

I can’t help but wonder if Chase is smart enough to realize that an increase in business credit card use, which they are agressively giving to non-business customers to get around the Credit Card Act of 2009 rules, does not equal an increase in commercial credit.

Hmmm.

Don’t do anything out of the ordinary

Don’t do anything out of the ordinary with Chase Bank, like trying to pay two mortgage payments early like this customer did, so you can go on a long vacation or for any other reason.  Given how bad Chase is in handling the small details, they will probably get it wrong, and in this case they did, charging the customer a late fee.

Chase’s sleazy mortgage refinancing

Personally, I have found mortgage brokers less honest than used car salesmen, so the fact that a mortgage broker working for Chase slipped in an extra flood insurance policy into escrow for a refinance doesn’t surprise me.

I went to refinance my home, in doing so, it came to my attention that the flood insurance had been added to my escrow account without notification. Three years ago my house had been rezoned into the 100 yr. flood zone. Although I have had a separate flood policy with Allstate, it was grandfathered in. I was never notified that I was being charged for insurance through may escrow account. When I went to refinance

with Chase a couple of months ago, this is where I found it. I have been on the phone for hours at a time to resolve this issue, only to be transferred from one branch to another on several different occasions.  I finally called my insurance agent to get payment history from Chase for the flood insurance and the only history they have is where I paid the policy myself, even though they have been taking it out of my escrow account for the past three years. No one with Chase will tell me where the money went. The are telling me that Allstate has been paid, Allstate has showed me records where they have only received payment from me. Chase won’t show me any records at all. They are crooks and owe me several thousand dollars for overpayment of flood insurance. I am looking for another mortgage company different from Chase, I will move my Money Market Account, Savings, Checking, My Mother’s account and my mother in law’s account out of that bank if some thing doesn’t get resolved in a hurry. The have gotten far to big and don’t care about customer service. What they don’t realize is that there are other banks that would like to have our money. Don’t do business with them you will regret it.

One way Chase is rejecting loan modifications

Here is one example of how Chase is rejecting people who should be qualifying for a loan modification:

When he tried to change the terms of his home loan, Michael Guzman was rejected because the bank didn’t consider his joblessness a long-term hardship.

Perhaps Chase didn’t read the HAMP rules, because …

Guzman, of Lake Stevens, has been unemployed for more than two years and was told — incorrectly — by Chase last year that his joblessness did not count as a permanent hardship.

Chase’s answer when the fact that loss of a job should be considered a permanent hardship?

“Servicers continue to evolve their implementation of HAMP,” Chase said in a statement.

Moreover, Chase said, it asked Guzman to reapply for loan assistance, but he has refused.

Guzman said he’s already submitted paperwork three times.

Chase sets new low for savings interest rate & fees

I know interest rates on checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, and the like are pretty pathetic these days, but I think Chase may have set a new low with their recent offer of 0.01% interest on a savings account. Given the potential fees, such as a $4 monthly fee if the balance falls below $300, $2 for a non-chase ATM (yes, this is Chase charging you this fee, in addition to what the ATM owner charges), and $3 for each withdrawal after your first free 4 withdrawals in a month.

Here is the story:

It’s getting tougher for U.S. savers to find a bank where they won’t end up paying to keep their money safe.

The average interest paid on savings, checking, money-market and certificate of deposit accounts fell to 0.99 percent in July, the first dip below 1 percent in a decade, according to researcher Market Rates Insight. Banks also have been raising fees and adding new ones, most recently in response to the financial-services overhaul bill that became law July 21.

The result is that an increasing number of savers are seeing their deposit earnings eaten up by charges. That’s frustrating people like Ken Ward, who recently passed on a savings account with a 0.01 percent interest rate at the Chase bank branch near his home in Wantagh, New York.

Read more …