This story follows a very typical pattern with Chase:
- Borrower is mistreated in some way
- Borrower exhausts all attempts to resolve the issue with Chase
- Borrower complains to the media which does a story
- Chase does an about face
JPMorgan Chase, which already is under fire for overcharging troops on active duty, decided two months ago to end a program which has helped hundreds of service men and women by allowing them to defer student loan payments while on active duty, NBC News has learned.
Chase’s decision to end the voluntary program came to light when the bank was contacted by the wife of a soldier serving in Afghanistan, and she was told the bank decided in December to stop allowing active-duty troops to delay paying their student loans.
“They informed me that they are no longer deferring private student loans for active duty military personnel,” said Kerri Napoli, whose husband, Army Pfc. Andrew Napoli, is now serving near Kandahar.
“The first words out of my mouth were, ‘How could you do that during a war?'” said Kerri Napoli.
After repeated conversations with Chase, Napoli says she told the bank last month that she had contacted NBC News. The next day, she says, the bank told her it would grant her husband an exception to the new policy and defer his loan.
The bank also has had second thoughts about ending a program aimed at helping U.S. troops with their family finances.
And here it is …
After NBC News contacted the bank about why it had stopped allowing deferred payments, a Chase official said that decision was being reversed and the program would be reinstated.
“Upon review, we have decided to reinstitute the loan deferment for all active-duty service members who request it,” said Kristin Lemkau, a Chase spokeswoman.
Read the entire story …
It has been well documented that Chase has a firm hand in manipulating deposits and credits to maximize overdraft fees, so this settlement by Bank of America against a suit filed in 2000 for similar behavior, in which Chase is also a defendant, has us wondering if Chase is next? BofA settled for $410 million.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) has agreed to pay $410 million to settle lawsuits accusing it of charging customers with excessive overdraft fees, court documents show.
The largest U.S. bank by assets is among the more than two dozen U.S., Canadian and European lenders named as defendants in the class-action litigation, which in 2009 consolidated lawsuits filed across the country.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N) and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) are among the other defendants named in the case, court records show.
You are a bank, and have a client that makes you quite a bit of money, but you suspect or know that client may substantially involved in fraud. What do you do?
If you are JPMorgan Chase, according to a suit filed by Madoff trustee Irving Picard, you sweep aside your concerns and continue business as usual.
Lawsuit Charges JPMorgan Suspected But Ignored Madoff Fraud
Bernie Madoff was not a criminal mastermind who single-handedly made fools of the world’s sophisticated investors.
An explosive lawsuit charges he got help from his friendly bankers at Chase — who had serious suspicions but coldly decided not to make waves while they were raking in a half-billion dollars in fees and profits from the Ponzi schemer’s victims.
The suit, filed by Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for those victims, seeks $6.4 billion from JPMorgan Chase for the investors who took paper losses totaling $65 billion.
“Incredibly, the bank’s top executives were warned in blunt terms about speculation that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme — yet the bank appears to have been concerned only with protecting its own investments,” said Deborah Renner, a lawyer on Picard’s team.
Read more …
The ethical bad-news didn’t stop at taking fees from Madoff; Chase is also accused of taking its own money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, that were invested with Madoff out of his funds because they suspected his operations and returns were not above board.
We received this comment and it brings up an interesting deficiency in Chase’s iPhone app:
I deposited a check with my iphone and it was returned. Chase charged a fee of $10 because the iphone photo was not complete of the front check. I am sure I took the photo but the app doesn’t save the photo in your cellular, It will be the last iphone deposit I will make with Chase. Sorry !!
The question here is why is Chase using this as an opportunity to ding a customer with a fee? If Chase was reasonable, when something like this occurred, it would be reviewed by an actual person and, seeing it was a technology failure, the customer would NOT be charged a fee but perhaps emailed instructions on how to better use the technology.
But as one customer discovered when the deposited a check written in red ink, which caused Chase to flag fraud and close their account, real people don’t actually review out-of-the-ordinary events at Chase.
Or better yet, their technology would actually recognize an incomplete check.
We’ve previously reported on our theory that Chase is loosing depositors by the droves. A recent mailer they have been sending out might indicate that the outflow has reached a crisis and Chase is getting desperate to attract more low cost capital (the thing that fuels their other businesses).
Chase, and WaMu before it has long offered a $100 (or sometimes $125) bonus for opening up a new account. Their latest mailer offers a total of $300 for opening a checking and a savings account, quite a bump.
One customer, after having switch to online only estatements, and some time later having become disillusioned with Chase, closed his account, found that he couldn’t access old statements online anymore. So he called Chase, and they informed him that his account was closed and they couldn’t help him. So he mentioned that he could go in to any branch and pay $5 per statement. Shouldn’t they have mentioned this? No, the replied, it’s $6 per statement.
Oh bother.
We received this great not from a reader:
I just wanted to say that your website and the Move Your Money Project really got the ball rolling for my husband and I. We were only with Chase for a few months when it became apparent that we weren’t fans. They even managed to close our savings without us knowing.
We are in the process of moving everything and we’ve opened an account at a local credit union.
I hope more and more people are realizing the rip-off that Chase is.
Keep up the good work.
It’s not too late to become an ex-customer of Chase!
Bad bad Chase | admin February 7, 2011 | 
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