Like change your address:
It was 2 weeks ago today that I called Chase Bank because they’d sent a Visa card to my old address. I was told I’d get the new card at my new address in 2 business days.
Ten business days later I had not received the new card, so I called again.
Ineptitude | admin August 13, 2010 | 
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Reader Mike writes:
I had a Mileage Plus credit card administered by Chase. I was charged with a $60
renewal fee without my OK. I complained, and was sent a check for $60 several
months later. I didn’t cash it for several months, when I did so, it was returned.When I called Chase I was told, “sorry we have no record of your account since it has
been closed.”Now I get a letter saying if the check was lost, please fill in this form and
return it, or the property will go to the state. It says anything over $50 needs
to be notarized. What a joke. I am at the same address as when I was a cardholder
and was issued the check.One of the reasons I quit Chase was the large number of unsolicited calls from
Chase’s “business partners” many of whom ignored the do not call list.Hopefully Chase’s miserable business practices will be approved with
JP Morgan as the parent.
How can a company do business like this? Seriously!
I received an email from a reader informing me of an unplanned outage of the Chase online banking last weekend and their attempt to cover it up by claiming that it was a planned maintenance outage.
Chase suffered a 15-hour outage of their online banking system last weekend. In response to inquiries about the incident, Chase is now attempting to cover up the importance of it by incredibly claiming that it was entirely maintenance activity that they planned in advance. Go here for more info:
http://boomzilla-boomzilla.blogspot.com/2010/08/chasecom-down-for-12-hours.html
I am duplicating the info below in case it disappears:
Going on now for at least 12 hours (point in time when I first tried the site — but could have been much longer), Chase accounts are unavailable. They keep a rudimentary web site up so they don’t get reported for being down – although to all intents and purposes they are down. Kinda rough if, like me, you signed up for their web-only account information and opted out of snail-mail communications (“to save money and be green”) – looks like I’ll be flipping that decison as soon as their site is back up for me to do so. Who takes as website offline for maintenance these days?
Update: August 9. Just received the following communication from Chase:
I am writing in response to your inquiry about not being
able to see your account information online.Please be advised that we were experiencing technical
difficulties with our website. Our technicians have
corrected this issue and the website is now available
online. If you still face any difficulties, please call
our technical department on the number mentioned below.I apologize for any trouble it may have caused to you.
If you have any further questions, please reply using the
Secure Message Center.Thank You,
Vinay Shankar
E-mail Customer Service RepresentativeSo Chase Customer Service says it was an unplanned outage; Chase Web-dev team say it was a planned outage. I asked them which one. I wonder if I’ll even get the courtesy of a response 😉
Ineptitude | admin August 12, 2010 | Comments (4)
The Watsonville California Chase branch was treated to a visit by protesters claiming that Chase is not paying the proper amount of property taxes on properties recently acquired through foreclosure.
WATSONVILLE — Frustration with the banking industry became so great for a group of Central Coast residents Tuesday they paraded into a Chase bank and demanded payback for the financial havoc wreaked by the nation’s foreclosure crisis.
“We had a conversation with the branch manager, and he decided he didn’t want to talk to us. And he threw us out,” reported activist Erik Larsen. “(But) we’ll be back.” Larsen was met outside by some 50 cheering people, part of an event staged in several California cities this week to highlight the alleged indiscretions of banks. Though it’s been two years since a taxpayer bailout helped rescue the industry from overly risky behavior, organizers of Tuesday’s event sought to show that bank actions are continuing to burden average American households.
A report by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, released in tandem with this week’s rallies, suggests that the financial industry is shorting taxpayers billions of dollars.
Among the group’s claims is that banks that changed hands during the bailout have not paid their updated property tax bill. No bank, according to the group, has settled up for the foreclosure toll they put on local governments for such expenses as additional neighborhood maintenance and public safety.
This was bound to happen given the highly aggressive deceptive and fear-based tactics Chase is using to get people to sign up for their overdraft protection.
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – JPMorgan Chase Bank forces customers to pay “absurdly high” overdraft fees on debit cards in violation of a federal regulation that protects people from such fees, according to a class action in Federal Court. Congress passed Regulation E in November 2009; it requires bank customers to “opt in” before banks can charge them overdraft fees on debit transactions.
Chase, which claims that Regulation E will cost it $500 million a year, “is doing everything it possibly can to scare and mislead customers into opting-in to an abusive and unfair overdraft program, which causes significant harm to its most vulnerable customers, while resulting in massive profits for the bank,” according to the complaint.
The class claims Chase is aggressively pushing its customers to opt in, bombarding them with misleading ads that “create the impression that the customers’ debit card will simply stop working or experience significant problems in everyday usage if they do not opt-in to being charged overdraft fees.”
To bully customers into opting in to its overdraft program, the class says, Chase has altered its available-funds policy so that direct deposit funds are not available on the day the money is received – but only for customers who have not opted in.
“Chase is fully aware that many of its customers who live paycheck to paycheck need to have access to their funds on the day that they make deposits, such as direct pay checks from employers,” the class claims.
“However, Chase has changed its practice of making these funds available in order to create hardships for these customers … in order to coerce its customers into opting-in to the abusive overdraft program.”
Lead plaintiffs Victor Espinosa and Rhonda Closson both claim that Chase withheld money from their paychecks, and say they were not given notice that their money would no longer be available on the day it was deposited.
The class seeks restitution and punitive damages for breach of contract, conversion, fraud and unfair business practices, and an order prohibiting Chase from running deceptive ads about its overdraft program.
They are represented by David Wright with McCune Wright of Redlands.
Fees & charges, Lawsuits, Legal & regulatory | admin August 11, 2010 | Comments (0)
This great article in the San Francisco Chronicle goes into great depth as to why Chase charges the amount of late fee it does (credit card) and what the author did to finally get a $39 late fee removed.
I was about to give up and pay the fee, but then I asked to speak to the rep’s manager. As I was transferred, I recomposed myself and then made the same request to the next agent, who promptly and politely said she would remove the fee!
Just like that.
So, why did the bank give in? And why didn’t I give up at the first rep’s repeated rejections?
But even more interesting is why the bank was ultimately willing to refund the fee.
But some credit-card issuers also take into account a “profitability score” when deciding whether to waive a fee — and that score doesn’t just correlate with risk, but with how much a bank expects to make from this customer. And a reliably paying (i.e., low-risk) customer is not necessarily a profitable one.
“Some people might assume that if they have a great risk score, they’re the customer that banks want,” Frank says. “But people who make payments on time are often not where the banks make their money.”
So, when I got to that second Chase rep — the one who waived my fee — she may have calculated that I was either a low-risk customer or a high-potential-profit customer, and wanted to keep me happy. And even if I haven’t been a profitable customer so far, Frank points out, there’s always the chance that I might make them money in the future.
I’ve experienced this myself. Every few years, almost like clockwork, my credit card companies raise my interest rates for no reason. It is often only a few points, and doesn’t really matter because I pay my card off every month anyways, but because of the principal, I will call them and ask to have the rate returned to where it was. This work many times for my card with Citibank, which was my first card and I had it for more than 15 years. Sometimes when they refused, I would ask them to cancel the card on the spot, and they would transfer me to the customer retention department who would agree to lower my rate again.
But one year, they simply agreed to cancel my card. This was in 2006, just before the sub-prime fiasco hit.
This really makes me wonder, why is it that banks don’t want customers that are reliable and pay off their bill every month. Have they become so addicted to the fee income they get from risky customers that they can’t stand having a good customer whom they make less money from? Certainly, they make some money from me, from merchant fees.
If they are still dropping reliable (but boring) customers for sub-prime ones, perhaps we aren’t through this sub-prime mess just yet.
Customer service, Fees & charges | admin August 9, 2010 | Comments (0)
Well isn’t this just precious. Looks like the bloom is off the rose. JP Morgan Chase, while they obviously are a huge retail bank, are an investment bank at their core and trading derivatives on their own account has made up a huge part of their income, especially the last year or so as they have access to easy money from the Fed. But it looks as if they might want to pay a little more attention to their bastard stepchild retail banking arm when they start making big trading mistakes like this.
Coal-Trade Losses Sting J.P. Morgan
Loss of $130 million is setback for commodities business; bank expected to report healthy second-quarter profit
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is expected to report a healthy second-quarter profit on Thursday. But one result the bank won’t likely talk about is its bad trade on coal.
Commodities trader Chan Bhima lost $130 million in revenue while wagering on a decline of European coal prices, according to people familiar with the matter. The trade was up in April. But a jump in coal prices later that month began to wipe out all gains, said one of these people. By mid-June, it had become one of the biggest losing positions at the bank’s commodities desk so far this year, this person added. It is expected that Mr. Bhima will leave the firm and has been working on a transition, said another person familiar with the matter.
J.P. Morgan and Mr. Bhima declined to comment.
The bad trade is a setback for J.P. Morgan’s fledgling commodities business, which still lags behind those of Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley, both of which have been in that business longer. The company began ramping up its investments in commodities several years ago, and its business grew with the acquisition of Bear Stearns Cos. Earlier this month, the bank completed its $1.6 billion purchase of assets from RBS Sempra Commodities which, only weeks before the transaction closed, was the victim of a heist of copper and nickel it stored for customers.
The coal-trading loss represents a small fraction of J.P. Morgan’s fixed-income revenue, which in the first quarter amounted to $5.4 billion as its investment bank posted a profit of $2.47 billion. But Mr. Bhima, who joined the bank last year to run J.P. Morgan’s global coal business, was part of the bank’s expansion of the company’s commodities operations. He previously worked for Merrill Lynch & Co., and brought other members of his team with him.
Mr. Bhima bet on a decline of European coal prices because of high coal inventories and slow economic growth there. He was shorting the contracts for delivery in 2010 and 2011, while hedging part of his position with bets prices would rise after that. The trade served him well in the first quarter—prices of coal were down 10% in Europe—helping net a revenue gain of about $50 million for the bank, said a person familiar with the trade.
By late-April, Mr. Bhima’s short positions on European coal were near $1 billion in notional contract prices, the people familiar with the trade said.
But the markets started to turn against them. In a move that surprised many, coal prices in Europe moved up in April despite the worries surrounding the sovereign-debt crisis there. By mid-June, the prices had rallied 31%, wiping out all the gains and flipping the trade into one of the commodities desk’s biggest losses.
It looks like the examiner appointed to look into the seizure and sale of WaMu’s assets is actually taking this seriously, as he recently submitted an estimate of the cost of his work ($4 million) and requested subpoena power to be able to request documents from JP Morgan Chase and others.
Update: The examiner was awarded subpoena powers as requested.
WaMu failure | admin August 8, 2010 | Comments (0)
