SeattleCrime.com posted a story about a Chase branch being robbed. The only comments on the story, some people ranting about Chase.
Obviously, a bank robbery isn’t a laughing matter so I can’t really condone the insensitivity the commentors have to the situation, but it just goes to show how mad at Chase people really are. If you really want to see the comments, you can view them here.
Bad bad Chase | admin July 21, 2010 | 
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By David Lazarus
July 20, 2010Matthew Pinnavaia sued Chase after the bank closed his two business accounts and four personal accounts even though the balance on each card was no more than $4,000. He may win a $2-million judgment.
Matthew Pinnavaia was among the hundreds of thousands of people whose credit card accounts were either shut down or limited over the last couple of years as banks grappled with the meltdown of the financial markets.
Unlike most people, though, Pinnavaia decided to do something about it. He taught himself the law and sued Chase bank.
Now there’s a chance — a slim one, perhaps, but a chance — that he could be awarded $2 million in damages by a San Diego County Superior Court judge because Chase failed for months to respond to his lawsuit, as required by state law.’
Update: As of 7/24/10, there are 20 comments on this story at LATimes.com and not one of them is in defense of Chase bank!
After much persistence and many outright rejections by the bankruptcy judge assigned to the Washington Mutual bankruptcy case, WaMu shareholders have finally won the right to an investigation, with the court agreeing to appoint a special examiner to investigate the role of the FDIC and JP Morgan Chase in WaMu’s seizure and, and the value of WaMu’s current assets.
Read more about this @Bloomberg here.
According to an article from CNBC, several big banks, including Chase, have been accused of short sale fraud as second lien holders.
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But here’s what’s not legal and what’s apparently happening quite often recently. Since many second lien holders are getting very little, they are now allegedly requesting money on the side from either real estate agents or the buyers in the short sale. When I say “on the side,” I mean in cash, off the HUD settlement statements, so the first lien holder doesn’t see it.
“They are pretty clear and pretty upfront about the fact that if the first lender knows they are getting paid, the first lender will kill the short sale,” says Brandt. “So these second lenders are asking for the payments off the closing documents, off the HUD statement, usually in a cashiers check prior to closing. Once they receive that payment, they will allow the short sale to go through, which according to RESPA laws and the lawyers that we have spoken to on the topic is not legal.”
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Brandt told me he’s heard from at least 200 agents that they’ve had these requests made by representatives of Citi Mortgage, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other large banks.
Fraud, Lawsuits, Loan modification | admin July 20, 2010 | Comments (0)
We recently reported on mistake Chase made that killed a Seattle area soap company. Looks like they’ve done it again in the Seattle area, this time to the wife of an area columnist. By freezing the credit line his wife used to run a small housing development business, something that broke their own contract, they cost the business two months of progress and thousands of dollars.
I was a longtime Washington Mutual customer (back when it was a “friend of the family”). When Chase took over, inertia, or maybe it was laziness, kept me hanging around.
Bad move. In the spring, Chase, for no good reason, plunged my family into a financial crisis.
Without notice, Chase froze a line of credit my wife was using to run her small housing-development business. She had a project in mid-construction. One day she had money to pay the construction crew. The next day it was gone.
She had to halt construction, lay off workers and spend two months and thousands of dollars appealing to a disinterested corporate Borg. (The loan eventually was reinstated when it was made clear that Chase, by its own contract, had no grounds to freeze it.)
We pointed this out in a post yesterday, but I thought it was so ridiculous it was worth mentioning again.
An article in the Arizona Sun newspaper discussing people’s difficulty getting loan modifications with Chase gave as an example one customer who was able to get a loan modification successfully. His total reduction in monthly payment after months of working hard to get a modification? A whopping 22 cents.
Other than on sites specifically dedicated to fighting abusive banks, like ours, or peoples personal blogs, there haven’t been too many stories about the trials and tribulations of loan modifications in the mainstream press. So it is nice to see a paper like the Arizona Daily Sun print a story about an Arizona woman and her struggles for the last 13 months trying to get a loan modification and stave off foreclosure.
And wouldn’t you know it, her bank just happens to be Chase.
It is a very typical Chase loan modification story with hours spent on the phone, repeatedly lost paperwork, Chase employees not returning her calls, and never speaking to the same person twice.
The article talks about one Chase customer that was able to get a loan modification, for a whopping 22 cents per month reduction in his payment.
Loan modification | admin July 19, 2010 | Comments (0)
As a large bank Chase is bound to be the target of phishing emails, and they do in fact proliferate, for example. this one. If you are a Chase customer, educate yourself on the latest Chase scam emails going around here and enter “chase” in the apparent sender field.
A general rule of thumb is to NEVER click on a link directly from an email that asks you for any personal information. Always type in URL’s directly in the browser yourself.
Sure, a link to a YouTube video your friend sends you is Ok, but if it appears to be YouTube asking you for your credentials, then be suspect.
Fraud | admin | Comments (0)
