Naomi Wolf sues Chase for stonewalling fraud investigation
The fact that best selling author Naomi Wolf was defrauded out of $300,000 isn’t the most interesting part of this story. The most interesting part is that she is accusing WaMu, and subsequently Chase of a systematic approach of stonewalling fraud investigations so that customers have no recourse and the bank can’t be held accountable. You can read the about this interesting story at the Huffington Post or The Smoking Gun.
Then the same officials who had directed me to keep the accounts open, disappeared — systematically, for just over six months. When I sought to talk to the fraud department, I still could not get records — including my own missing bank statements — even to see the full extent of my losses. The bank officials who had directed me to keep my accounts open were unavailable at the branch — over the course of many attempts to speak with them. The police at the Sixth Precinct needed to see the missing documents, but even they could not force WaMu to hand over their — my — records. (WaMu’s own internal emails cite a $300,000 figure for my loss from fraud — I still did not have enough of my records to identify the loss. It is illegal, by the way, to withhold from an account holder his or her own records).
At eight months after the fraud discovery was confirmed — eight months of trying to communicate with officials and a fraud department who were oddly unavailable or unresponsive — I received a form letter from the WaMu Fraud Department advising me that according to the regulations, I had had a six month window for taking action; and (since WaMu had played out the clock for eight months) the letter asserted that I had waited ‘too long’ and my case was closed.
But she got lucky, because a bank official accidentally gave her the wrong file which contained damaging evidence of their policy of stonewalling investigations in the form of several emails.
Inadvertently, subsequent to that, a WaMu bank official handed me the wrong file — wrong from his point of view; illuminating from mine, and from any consumer’s. It contained emails, some of which you can see at TheSmokingGun.com, from WaMu bank officials to one another — and including emails from and to their counsel, PR department and and the fraud department — that take as given that stonewalling a client with a fraud claim on the bank is standard practice; and yet one freaked-out bank official in the emails warns his colleagues that if their mechanisms in this regard became known, their practices would be all over the newspapers.
It is unclear whether this practice was limited to WaMu or also a policy of Chase.
Bad bad Chase | admin August 24, 2010
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By Linda, September 21, 2011 @ 7:48 pm
I do not know how old this post is but HOWDY~ I am going to assume the WaMu did carry on through Chase. You founded the perfect word “stonewalled” I do not know how to prove who I am to you but I think what you went through is my next step. I have been working with Chase since March to get a modification loan. They are “stonewalling me” on the loan and last I heard last week have hit me with over $6, 000- in fees and for what I do not know. I have a long story and will go further into it when I see there is actually someone still out there.
I stopped making payments (now 3 months) when I found out about all the fees. But I never get the same person or same story when I call. I know they are in the backgtround waiting to foreclose. I just located Chase’s fraud email only to find out it is not working. Go figure. Please any one out there…HELP
Linda
So, if someone is still out there on this….help! I am going to loose my home of 24 years. I am 62 years old and medically retired.