Chase Bank Part 3. Or maybe 4. The conclusion, nevertheless.

I don’t have time to link to all the other posts, but you can do a search for “Chase” in the box to the right.

I had made a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, among other places, about the problems we were having with Chase. Apparently the only way to get results is to contact them, because my complaint was forwarded automatically to the local BBB office in charge of Delaware, where the main offices of Chase Bank are located. The very next business day after I made the complaint, I received a call from someone at the CEO offices at Chase Bank to let me know they were looking into my complaint.

About a week later, another person called from the Chase CEO offices and talked to Chris. She said she could not talk to me since I was not the primary cardholder, although I had been the one to make the complaint (and change our email address, and argue about our bill, and get reported to the credit bureaus along with Chris…). She verified the information I had put in my complaint: namely, that we did not receive any bill notifications online, did not receive a letter in the mail, and that we had paid up once we discovered the outstanding bills.

She told Chris that she would credit us for the late fees and finance fees, and remove the negative information about us at the credit bureaus.

I said, “What about the Amazon points?”

Chris said, “I didn’t want to push it. Getting the credit stuff removed is pretty good.”

I reluctantly accepted this, but didn’t feel better about doing so until a few days later when we received a letter from the CEO offices, restating what the woman had told Chris on the phone, and also mentioning that we would receive a refund check for the late and finance fees we had already paid. When the check arrived, I discovered that Chase had reversed two late fees twice, by accident. Given all the hassle they’d caused, I was fine with getting $68 free from them.

Our account had also been reopened, although we hadn’t asked for that, and Chris got an email notice a week ago about our next statement being available for viewing. With all the problems we’d had, we obviously hadn’t been able to charge anything on the card, so I’m not sure why I decided to check our account today. Maybe it was because I’d just finished going over our tax returns, which our CPA had done incorrectly the first time and incorrectly the second time, which led to him amending the amended return.

To my surprise, our online bill said that we owed $3.21. When I looked closer, I realized it was a finance charge of $3.21 that they wanted us to pay. And that, oddly, our Amazon points had somehow been reinstated without anyone telling us, because the bottom of the invoice said that we had earned a $25 Amazon.com reward certificate which would be mailed to us in 14 days.

I called Chase to find out about this finance fee. First, I explained our situation to Jerry, the unfortunate customer service representative from Chase who had answered my phone call.

“We had a huge problem with this card that I thought was straightened out,” I told him. “We never received some online bill notifications, but we paid everything Chase said we owed and got our late fees reversed, so what’s this $3.21 on our bill?”

Jerry said, “Well, the $3.21 is a finance charge on the average daily balance of last month, when you were carrying a balance.”

“Then why did we get a refund check?” I demanded. “Couldn’t you have just taken the finance charges out of that?”

“Let me see,” Jerry said. He paused a moment, during which I imagined him reading internal CSR notes on our account.

“Yes, I see you got a check back for $125.29,” he said. “I’ll remove the finance charge. Your new balance is zero.”

Perhaps Jerry had just found a note on our account like, “WIFE OF PRIMARY CARD HOLDER STATES NEVER RECEIVED BILL. SHE IS VERY VERY MAD. GET OFF PHONE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE” because he didn’t even ask if I had other questions or if he could help me with something else. I thanked him, and he hung up.

From this whole debacle we have earned:

• $10 gift certificate from Amazon
• $68 from Chase
• $25 additional gift certificate from Amazon

but I would still have preferred not to go through this at all.

Posted by: ssjane | April 13, 2007 | 3:51 pm
Posted in: Rants