Chase Bank and the Final Fraudulent Straw


I am beginning this tale at the end.   Before I am done it will have several chapters to tell this sad and confusing story of the big banking systems here in America, and one family's journey through it.

Those chapters are:

Chase Bank and the Half Percent Return
Chase  Bank and the You're-not-credit -worthy Judgement
Chase Bank and the Missing Data
Chase Bank and the Locked-Out Safety Deposit Box

I'm relating this epic tale because I have some real concerns about what it means, and I've found that our strange experiences are not unique to us.    Often these types of things happen and continue to happen because we the people simply don't compare notes. 

There are aspects of this story that will be hard to relate without "too much information", but I'll dance around that as best I can.

As I said, we start with the final chapter of this saga, wherein we have finally had enough and are actively ending our relationship with Chase - no small feat these days, as our daily financial lives become quite intertwined with the financial institutions we do business with over time.

This story begins as these stories often do  simply enough  on Wednesday last when Anne  noticed a couple of strange transactions in her daily inspection of our online banking.    The transactions appeared to be payments of our Chase credit cards - but there were three of them in a row, on consecutive days.    She probably had not noticed the first one (as it looked normal).    In spotting three such "account transfers" to credit cards in a row, averaging about $1000 each, she also noticed the last four digits of the credit card number did not actually match any of our credit cards. 

We contacted our bank, who sent us along to their fraud department.    We are "private clients" with Chase, which frankly does not mean much - but in this particular case, it did mean a higher level of service.   

The fraud representative was clearly new on the job, which manifested itself in his communication with us.   We made our way through this.  He was not there to explain how this happened, he was just there to get a claim filed and an investigation started, which he did.   He also told us we needed to close our account immediately and start a new one. 

What?

Yes, that was his advice.   As a first step, he recommended that we freeze our current checking account (the one with the fake transfers), so that money could go in but nothing could go out.   We did so.


The next day, we went to our local branch.    In researching all of this, we had first assumed that our account id and passwords had been hacked.   In looking closer, we had come to believe  that we ourselves could not have created the transactions we were seeing - you can't pay a credit card that isn't in your profile.     Our local bankers validated this point.   They agreed that neither we NOR they as tellers and bankers could have created the transactions we were seeing on our account. 

This confirmed my suspicion - WE were not hacked; Chase was hacked.     The transactions we were seeing, 3 of them totaling over $3,000, were not created through online banking as they indicated.   There were no records of logins at those times; and no way to create them.    That means they were created by back-end processes or in the banks databases themselves, either through a hack or a gross error in their systems.   I know something about complex computerized transaction systems, and this was obvious to me.

After everything we'd experienced with Chase over the years, this was indeed the last straw.    we started moving our account immediately.    To be fair, Chase refunded the money to our account within 12 hours, and our local branch provided the finest service we'd every had (our Woodinville branch was awful).    Still, we could not escape the feeling that our money  was not safe.

The next day, I talked with a family member and found our that on the exact same days, they also had fraudulent transactions on their account.    They were of a different type (they were told that someone had obtained "pictures of their checks", but a greater amount - $6,000.    Unfortunately they were not private clients and their money could take up to 60 days to be refunded.    Is this a coincidence?     Or did Chase get hit hard last week?
It is a
The reader may feel this is an overreaction; and taken by itself it may be.    It is a HUGE amount of work to close accounts and inform all of your trading partners that you have new accounts to deposit into, and re-set your bill-pay profiles.    It has taken us days so far and is not complete yet.


I'd like to end with some good advice for avoiding this yourself, but what would that be?

- Check your account EVERY SINGLE DAY.
- Have good password management - DO'T use the same ID's and passwords for different accounts (I know how tough this is).
- Have cash on hand.     Something like this could clean out your account and it can take months to get your money back.
- Do your best to have a secure home network.    If you use contractors to install your network, don't leave the passwords in their hands.  This includes the audio video guys you hired to set up your new home media system that you gave those passwords to.

The overall pattern of banking behavior that i'll relate in the rest of this Chase tale has me very concerned.    You be the judge; more to come.

Happy State of the Union Day!