When talking with Chase, be precise, and ask several times
Here is a great story that outlines exactly the tendency of Chase’s customer service to give incomplete or simply bad information.
How Chase Bank Almost Helped a Teenager Get Scammed
by Jeff Sovern
A teenager I know responded to a listing for a summer job on Craig’s List. The employer claimed he was opening an art gallery and would pay $400 a week for twelve hours of work running errands and the like. Because he was out of the country, he was unable to meet her, but emailed her a list of questions. Upon receiving her answers, he hired her. She was thrilled.
Shortly afterwards, he overnighted her two money orders totaling $1,700. He instructed her to deposit them and take $200 for half of her first week’s salary; she was to wire the remaining $1,500 to an artist that day. When she mentioned this to me, I became concerned. What if she wired the money and the money orders later came back dishonored? And why hadn’t he wired the money himself rather than trusting a teenager he had never met?
So she called her bank–JPMorgan Chase–to find out how long it would take before the money orders cleared. The answer she received was one day. That didn’t sound right to me, so I got on the phone. I explained my concern that this was a scam and that I didn’t want to know when she could draw on the funds, but rather when the funds would clear so that she was assured that the bank would not charge back her account when the money orders came back dishonored. Once again, I was told one day. I was still unconvinced, so we called again. Again we were told one day. I haven’t looked at check clearing for ages; had things changed so much in the interval? I tried a third call to Chase, and this time the representative told me what I had expected to hear the first time: while Chase would make the funds available in one business day, it could take much longer than that to determine if the money order was legitimate and that if it were dishonored, Chase would charge back the account. I instructed the teenager to text the employer that she would not wire the funds until the money orders had cleared, on the theory that if he’s legitimate, he will get in touch with her. So far, she hasn’t heard back. I don’t think she will.
The teenager is disappointed at the loss of her seeming summer job and simultaneously relieved at not having lost her savings. But there’s a bigger issue here than just what happened to her. Most teenagers–and probably most adults–would have stopped at the first phone call. Many would have wired the money. Maybe they could later persuade Chase that it should not charge their account back for the dishonored money order because of the information provided by its customer service agent, but more likely they wouldn’t be able to. Chase was in a position to prevent this fraud–and it didn’t.
First of all, I am simply shocked that Chase would make any deposited funds available that quickly. Their tendency has been to stretch out the hold period longer and longer where now it is often 7-10 days. Second, the customer asked, how long until the check clears, not how long until funds are available. When talking with Chase, you may find it valuable to ask questions in two or three different ways, and perhaps with at least two different people, just to make sure you get the same answer each time.
Customer service, Ineptitude | admin July 16, 2010
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By coakl, January 11, 2011 @ 4:27 pm
First of all, banks are not your personal scam detector. In this case, that is the depositor’s responsibility.
Jeez, first people complain that banks hold their deposits too long. Now this complaint is that the bank holds are not long enough.
Chase does not have a magical direct link to the bank that the money orders are drawn on. Chase does not have direct access to another bank’s computer system. No banks have that; otherwise there would just be one huge national bank. The only way Chase would know if an item is “good” is if it doesn’t come back, i.e. makes a round trip.
Chase’s policy is to make most checks available the next day (including Saturdays if you made the deposit before closing time on Friday). That doesn’t mean Chase knows that the check is good. This is explained in the plain English portion of the account disclosures (first 12 pages or so).
Bank deposit holds are actually not that frequent. For a customer who’s been here longer than 30 days, a hold is either 2 business days or 7 business days. The 7-bus. day hold only comes in on large checks, the check come from a known bad source, or if there’s a past record of returned items.
Chase sucks for a lot of reasons but check hold policy is not one of them. Chase’s system doesn’t place that many holds because the shift from WaMu’s same-day availability to Chase next-day availability eliminated much of the check fraud that WaMu dealt with. Of course, many ex-WaMu customers consider the next-day availability to be a 1-day “hold” by Chase.