Chase can’t handle bank integration properly
Yet another story of a bank integration gone bad. A customer had an account with Great Western Bank which was integrated into WaMu. Great. Then Chase takes over WaMu and the customers account gets combined with an ex-boyfriends that she hasn’t been with in over 15 years! Perfectly failing in the small details.
But it wouldn’t be a Chase story if there wasn’t a quite a bit of Chase refusing to see and/or fix the problem which this story has plenty of.
Over 15 years ago I had a Chase money market/credit card account. It was a joint account with my boyfriend at the time. We split up in 1994, at which point I opened my own account at Great Western Bank and took my name off of the joint Chase account. Great Western became Wamu, and my Great Western checking account became a Wamu checking account.
Then in 2009, when Chase took over Wamu, my Wamu checking account became a Chase checking account. In about March of 2010 I started receiving email addressed to my ex-boyfriend at my own email account. In other words, I started receiving email from Chase addressed to a man I hadn’t lived with in over 15 years! I went online and noticed a credit card account that I’d never seen before! I called Chase and they told me it was a credit card in my ex’s name. They told me they couldn’t cancel the credit card because I was not the primary account holder. They would not let me take my name off of the account myself and instead sent me a form that they required my ex to fill out.
My ex contacted them and they told him they’d already closed the credit card account per my request (although they had not told ME they’d closed the account). At about this time I started to received hardcopy mail addressed to my ex at my own house, where my ex had never lived! One letter contained two new Chase credit cards, one with my name on it and one with his name. My online sessions still showed the “canceled” credit card account as one of my active accounts. I also started getting junk mail addressed to my ex — Amex solicitations and such. I called and emailed Chase to tell them that something must have corrupted the data for my account when they took over Wamu, but the Chase reps I talked to said that couldn’t have happened.
Meanwhile, I’d been using Wamu’s online bill-pay, which of course turned into Chase’s online bill-pay. Yesterday I was contacted by one of my payees, who told me the check he received had my name and a suspicious address printed on it. Guess what? It was my ex’s current house address!!! Apparently, the bill-pay checks that my payees have been receiving since Chase took over Wamu have all had my ex-boyfriend’s address printed on them!
Today I got off the phone with a Chase rep who said they will research my bill-pay payments and send me a list of payees who received checks with invalid addresses. (I could research that myself online, but it would require about 5 clicks per check to see what addressed was printed on them.) Now I am going to have to contact each of those payees to make sure they haven’t updated their records and replaced my house address with my ex’s, and that they haven’t been sending my bills to my ex’s house.
Ineptitude | admin July 14, 2010
