7+ months for a short sale … yikes!

Here’s an oldie but a goodie:  Chase’s delay delay delay tactics with anything that will help with loan troubles, including this example of a long short-sale delay:

Have been asking Chase Bank for short sale since Jan 14. If not 4closure is imminent, should we pay prop tax?

Husband lost his job in Dec. Just had a baby in Dec. Prop is investment property in FL with tenants who if approved want the short sale. Property tax …. to pay or not to pay in light of short sale or foreclosure? Also .. Any advice on how to get Chase to lean toward short sale?

And just for the record, as far as I know, any type of tax lien will survive foreclosure, short sale, or bankruptcy.  The government gets its money in the end.

Is Chase really this desperate for new fees

Chase-sucks.com recently posted a letter sent to them regarding a Chase customer that had a very strange experience when buying New York State Lottery tickets on their credit card.  Instead of a normal charge, Chase, under the guise of classifying the purchase as for illegal gambling, classified the purchase under a cash advance and added a $10 fee an an interest charge.  when contacted, Chase claimed that the mistake was the fault of the New York State Lottery, but when the customer contacted the Lottery, the Lottery confirmed that it was Chase that was responsible, and was using a loophole created by a new law in effect in June 2010 that allowed them to do this.

So basically they are using this loophole to bilk customers out of extra fees.

Court voids deed of trust for Chase TILA violations

Another win for the opposition.  Homeowner Paul Nguyen took Chase to court for violations of the Truth in Lending Act.  After a year-long legal battle, the court found in favor of Nguyen and voided his deed of trust with Chase bank, effectively wiping out his mortgage.  Furthermore, they awarded Nguyen $4,000 for each TILA violation for a total of $16,000. Here is a link to a lot more information on this case for anyone that might want to use Nguyen experience and research to take Chase to court.

I dont know how many people take it upon themselves to challenge their bank; but I was an experience I will never forget.  I challenged Chase on my mortgage based on TILA violations.  The bank retained a large law firm in So. CA with 3 lawyers.  So much motions and procedures to learn and apply as the case moved along in the last year.  Finally, the case went to trial yesterday.  The court finally rendered judgment in plaintiffs’ favor in voiding the deed of trust.  As far as the outstanding loan, it is forfeited and the bank would have to take that lost.  Furthermore, the court imposed statutory damages of $4k for each violations which amounted to about $16k.

I am in the process of preparing the judgment for the court to sign along with tax cost.  Believe it or not, I have expended over $10k in cost alone; which includes expert witness cost.

So much research was done and I hate to see it goes to waste.  If you have access to PACER, everything is there for public use.  Best of luck to all fighting the bank now and keep up your spirit.

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.

Chase bully and threat division

Apparently Chase has a group that constantly monitors the Internet for slanderous (i.e. true) statements about Chase and threatens the people to get them to take the offending content down.

During a very lengthy (6 hours, I am told) conversation, the lawyer from Chase told the lawyer from Keller Williams Realty International that if the videos in question,  mentioning Chase, were not removed from Kevin and Fred’s Short Sale Power Hour site,  Chase Bank would pull every REO listing from every single Keller Williams agent!  There are 80,000 Keller Williams agents.  Every REO listing that was a Chase listing from every single KW agent anywhere in the world.

Given that our site posts more negative information about Chase than just about anyone else, this group, like most of the others in Chase must not be very good at their jobs, cause we haven’t heard from them.

Use Chase blueprint, get axed?

About a month and a half ago, I wrote a piece on Chase’s new blueprint feature that allows people to schedule their credit card payments in association with what they are buying.  Chase calls it a financial management tool.  I called it a lose/lose for customers, because it urges them to spend more on a higher cost card.

Today I came across another analysis of blueprint which has one insight that I found very interesting.

But for Chase, the implications of this data in aggregate are significant. Check out Chase’s internal presentation on Blueprint, which you can download here. Here, the bank says that the purpose of Blueprint is that it “allows customers to better manage larger purchases,” and ”track their spending history by category.”

This is crucial for Chase, because it allows the bank to better understand your financial situation. Before, they merely waited around, hoping you’d pay down your balance. Now they can see your payment plans months in advance, letting them know if it’s time to tempt you with a higher-limit card, balance-transfer offer or some other promotion. (Mint.com essentially makes its money the same way, by finding offers that might appeal to someone with your financial profile.)

Did you catch that?  “it allows the bank to better understand your financial situation.”  This means that Chase will have yet another reason to ditch you as a customer, reduce your credit line, or jack your rates way up … your own attempts at managing your debt are telling them you are a risky customer, even if you are making your minimum payments on time.  Think I am wrong about this?  The analysis goes on with more useful data:

The system appears to be working, for better or worse. Chase has been fine-tuning the product in the last few weeks, increasing the low-end rate from 11.24% APR to 13.24%, even as credit card delinquencies industry-wide dropped last quarter. That could mean that Blueprint is working a little too well, allowing card-holders to take on more debt than they normally would, resulting in higher delinquencies for that specific card. Or it means that the product has become popular with a more delinquency-prone crowd. Either way, if Chase is raising rates on this card enough to shake up the entire industry’s average APR, it clearly feels it needs to insure itself against something.

I hate to say I told you so, but that is exactly what I was pointing out in my original post, that Chase had engineered the feature to get people to take on more debt, not to manage their money better, like a true financial planning tool.  Oh, and that expensive card just got more expensive as the higher APR attests to.

Protestors march on Watsonville Chase branch

The Watsonville California Chase branch was treated to a visit by protesters claiming that Chase is not paying the proper amount of property taxes on properties recently acquired through foreclosure.

WATSONVILLE — Frustration with the banking industry became so great for a group of Central Coast residents Tuesday they paraded into a Chase bank and demanded payback for the financial havoc wreaked by the nation’s foreclosure crisis.

“We had a conversation with the branch manager, and he decided he didn’t want to talk to us. And he threw us out,” reported activist Erik Larsen. “(But) we’ll be back.” Larsen was met outside by some 50 cheering people, part of an event staged in several California cities this week to highlight the alleged indiscretions of banks. Though it’s been two years since a taxpayer bailout helped rescue the industry from overly risky behavior, organizers of Tuesday’s event sought to show that bank actions are continuing to burden average American households.

A report by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, released in tandem with this week’s rallies, suggests that the financial industry is shorting taxpayers billions of dollars.

Among the group’s claims is that banks that changed hands during the bailout have not paid their updated property tax bill. No bank, according to the group, has settled up for the foreclosure toll they put on local governments for such expenses as additional neighborhood maintenance and public safety.

Read more …

Chase won’t take no for an answer, keeps harassing customers

We’ve heard this from several Chase customers, and this is another report of the same behavior.

I have been inundated with phone calls, bothersome requests for my time on bank visits, and mailings regarding “how my debit card works” from Chase bank over the past few months. Now, as near as I can tell, all they needed to know from the outset was whether or not I wanted to take advantage of their offer for Chase Overdraft Coverage for which you have made several postings already – however, just so we’re clear, I will copy and paste the options from their website:

“Select “Yes” if you want Chase to authorize and pay overdrafts on your everyday debit card transactions. Your everyday debit card purchases may be approved at Chase’s discretion, when you don’t have sufficient available funds. Standard overdraft fees may apply. Note: By choosing “Yes,” your account(s) will reflect your decision effective immediately.

Select “No” if you do not want Chase to authorize and pay overdrafts on your everyday debit card transactions. Your everyday debit card purchases will be declined if you don’t have sufficient funds. Accordingly, you will not be charged insufficient funds/overdraft fees for everyday debit card transactions. Note: By choosing “No,” your account(s) will reflect your decision on or before the second business day after your decision has been submitted.”

Simply put, this reads to me “Are you authorizing us (Chase Bank) to allow you to overdraw your account and thus charge you an overdraft fee, or would you prefer we decline your card in the event you don’t have enough money to pay for a purchase?”

No-brainer, right? No, I would not like you to allow me to spend money I don’t have and charge me even more money that I don’t have for the privilege of being allowed to make this purchase.

Problem is, I have declined this outright several times – both online and in person, and yet I am still being harangued every time I interact with my bank.