A customer reported that the online bill-pay feature at Chase.com has not been working since the aesthetic upgrade they performed the previous weekend.
This past weekend (11-13-11) Chase implemented a new look for their online banking. Starting on Monday morning the bill pay service has not been working. It is now Wednesday and we have had no bill payment service for three days!
outages | admin November 16, 2011 | 
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Makes sense to me.
Jamie Dimon is “America’s least hated banker,” the financial writer Roger Lowenstein wrote in The New York Times Magazine at the end of 2010. But if JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the best of the bunch, then that speaks volumes about how horribly banks have acted in recent years.
Where to start?
There’s the $211 million fine JPMorgan paid in July to settle charges that it defrauded local governments in 31 states—along with the $130 million it returned to municipalities it was accused of duping.
There’s the $722 million in fines and restitution payments it made after JPMorgan confederates were caught paying off officials in Jefferson County, Alabama (home to Birmingham), to secure a municipal finance deal that nearly bankrupted the county.
There’s the fact the bank was in so great a rush to evict people from their homes that it admits that some of its people might have forged foreclosure documents—a problem so widespread that it felt compelled to suspend 56,000 foreclosures while it investigated its own behavior.
Or maybe the biggest sin is the central role JPMorgan has played—and continues to play—in the rise of what might be called the “poverty industry”: all those businesses that exploit the working poor, such as the payday-loan industry, where lenders charge 400 percent interest on short-term, small-denomination loans against a person’s next paycheck (or their Social Security or unemployment payments).
And don’t forget the Bernie Madoff connection. Perhaps it’s not fair to blame JPMorgan for Madoff’s sins just because the infamous fraudster used Chase to handle billions of dollars in investors’ cash. Nonetheless, Madoff trustee Irving Picard has pointed an accusing finger at the bank. He has sued the bank for $6 billion, claiming that not only should it have known about the fraud, it did know. In June 2007, 18 months before Madoff’s fraud was exposed, an officer in the bank wrote an email to colleagues reporting that another bank executive “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.” The bank, the suit contends, had withdrawn all but $35 million of the $276 million it had invested in Madoff-linked hedge funds by the time the fraud was revealed. A JPMorgan spokesman “vigorously” denied Picard’s charges—and Picard has responded by tripling damages to $19 billion.
Bad bad Chase | admin November 7, 2011 | Comments (0)
From this blog post we find that a financial adviser employed by Chase likes to tell customers when he thinks they are in the moral wrong.
On October 27th 2011 I went in to have a chat with my bank, JP Morgan Chase to find out what investing options they have (if any). This was a pre-planned appointment based on a casual inquiry I had a week earlier with one of the tellers downstairs.
Went to the Chase Bank on Solano Avenue and was greeted by Emmett Peck who is the VP and a Certified Financial Planner (CFP).I provided some background info and told him that I’ve had to go through a short sale and was looking for more information on other investment areas.
— Bought a home 3 years ago for 350k which is now worth 150k. Pretty much worthless.
1) Emmett Peck told me that it’s people like me walking away from our homes that are causing all these financial and economic problems we are facing today.
— yes, Emmett Peck a Certified Financial Advisor stared at me point blank with total conviction that he believes this to be the truth.2) Emmett Peck also said that buying a home is NOT an investment. It’s to live in and is only for that purpose.
So if you are looking for some stellar advice from a condescending banker who blames the customer for the banking and economic problems (which apparently is caused by hardworking Americans who paid too much for their houses) — this is the bank you should make a beeline for.
If there ever was a time to challenge your Chase foreclosure, it is now.
It’s late, and it’s limited, but for borrowers who feel their homes were wrongly or inappropriately foreclosed upon in 2009 and 2010, there is now recourse.
As part of a larger enforcement action (so-called “consent orders”) taken last April against fourteen of the nation’s largest mortgage banks/servicers following the so-called “robo-signing” scandal, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is beginning a “multi-faceted independent review of foreclosure actions.”
The major banks, including Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, GMAC, and EMC, will have to fund these independent reviews to evaluate, “whether borrowers suffered financial injury through errors, misrepresentations, or other deficiencies in foreclosure practices.” If they did, those borrowers get some kind of “remediation.”
“The challenge is substantial, but the steps we have required the servicers to take are vitally important to resolving these issues in a way that respects the rights of those who have been harmed and helps to restore confidence in the system,” said John Walsh, Comptroller of the Currency in a statement.
The major mortgage servicers began sending out letters to eligible borrowers today to explain the process. The requests for the reviews must be received by April 30, 2012. So how many do they expect will request these reviews, given that there are potentially four and a quarter million eligible borrowers according to the OCC?
While most of the press I’ve read about this focuses on people who were foreclosed upon that should not have been (i.e. they were current on their mortgage) that represents just a small portion of the people Chase has wronged.
Where Chase has done the most harm is with the people that it told to stop paying their mortgage so they could be considered for a loan modification (and then foreclosed), the people that Chase said didn’t qualify for a loan modification (even though they should have), and the people that Chase blatantly foreclosed upon while they were in a trial modification and paying according to the rules (parallel foreclosure).
It is hard to say whether such customers will get a serious look under this program, but by challenging the foreclosure anyways, you are helping to send Chase a message and perhaps the regulators overseeing this process will take notice.
In other words, it’s worth a shot.
From all the whining, you’d think banks loss of their golden goose, automatically signing up people for debit card overdraft protection, was all but gone now that it has been outlawed.
Well, apparently that isn’t the case. According to Bloomberg Business Week (Overdraft Fees, The Dough Keeps Rolling In), banks have been able to keep about 70% of the overdraft revenue by using every manner imaginable to cajole customers into signing up for overdraft protection, something that clearly isn’t in customers interest.
Among some of the tactics is calling up customers that have had debit cards rejected due to insufficient funds (you know, what is supposed to happen when you are out of money) and giving them the impression that they will incur fees when this happens unless they sign up for overdraft protection.
Make no mistake, overdraft protection on debit cards benefits the banks only, not the customer (unless you like spending $40 on a latte).
To add insult to injury, the article claims that most big banks are still rearranging credits and debits under the guise that it helps customers. What this actually does is, when an overdraft does occur, it increases the likelihood that more overdraft fees will be applied, as banks will debit the largest item first, regardless of what order it all happened.
Fees & charges | admin November 6, 2011 | Comments (0)
I trust everyone had a great Bank Transfer Day, which was yesterday.
Apparently the biggest boon to credit unions this year has been the attempt by big banks (all but abandoned now) to institute a debit card usage fee. According to NPR Marketplace, credit unions have seen more new customer accounts opened in the last six weeks than they do in a typical year.
Congratulations on those of you who finally realized the big banks don’t care about you.
Here is an accusation from someone that appears to have researched what happened to him and found plenty of others that had the same thing happen; Chase moved up his credit card due date by just a few days without any noticed, in an apparent attempt to make payments late and charge late fees.
The scam was fairly obvious to me. This particular tactic by JP Morgan Chase was to jump their customer’s due dates back in order to force a huge influx of late fees. Since only a small percentage of customers ever bothered to call in to complain (as I did), then even if they refunded the late fee in those particular cases, they were still left with a huge population of customers who simply caved in to the abuse and didn’t bother, or didn’t care enough, to complain.
It seems their strategy was to move the dates forward just enough so people were more likely to barely miss the due date.
Bad bad Chase, Fees & charges | admin October 29, 2011 | Comments (0)
You have to read all the fine print with Chase and their announcement that after testing debit card fees in two markets since February, they won’t be adding them, according to the Wall Street Journal (Big Banks Blink on New Card Fees, 10/28/11). However, read the article in detail and it becomes clear that they are likely punting on this plan only due to the large amount of negative publicity that Bank of American has been receiving for the $5 monthly debit card fee it announced recently.
J.P. Morgan joins U.S. Bancorp, Citigroup Inc., PNC Financial Services Group Inc., KeyCorp and other large banks that have said in recent days that they won’t impose monthly fees on debit cards. None of those banks said they made their decisions because of the outcry over Bank of America’s fees.
“We looked at all options and quickly decided it didn’t fit with our overall strategy,” said David Bowen, who runs the consumer-product business at Cleveland-based Key, which ranks among the 20 largest banks in the country.
Sounds good, right, they made a logical decision that it wasn’t in the best interest of the bank or its customers. But read on.
Chase was one of the first big banks to explore monthly fees on debit cards. The bank began testing monthly fees of $3 in Wisconsin and Georgia in February. Those tests are scheduled to end in mid-November and won’t be renewed or expanded for now, said the person familiar with the bank’s plans.
For now. Clearly they are keeping this option open and the timing makes it highly unlikely it ISN’T in response to the negative publicity.
Fees & charges | admin October 28, 2011 | Comments (0)
