Does Chase move credit card due dates forward to maximize late fees?

Here is an accusation from someone that appears to have researched what happened to him and found plenty of others that had the same thing happen; Chase moved up his credit card due date by just a few days without any noticed, in an apparent attempt to make payments late and charge late fees.

The scam was fairly obvious to me. This particular tactic by JP Morgan Chase was to jump their customer’s due dates back in order to force a huge influx of late fees. Since only a small percentage of customers ever bothered to call in to complain (as I did), then even if they refunded the late fee in those particular cases, they were still left with a huge population of customers who simply caved in to the abuse and didn’t bother, or didn’t care enough, to complain.

It seems their strategy was to move the dates forward just enough so people were more likely to barely miss the due date.

Chase drops plans for debit card fees … FOR NOW

You have to read all the fine print with Chase and their announcement that after testing debit card fees in two markets since February, they won’t be adding them, according to the Wall Street Journal (Big Banks Blink on New Card Fees, 10/28/11).  However, read the article in detail and it becomes clear that they are likely punting on this plan only due to the large amount of negative publicity that Bank of American has been receiving for the $5 monthly debit card fee it announced recently.

J.P. Morgan joins U.S. Bancorp, Citigroup Inc., PNC Financial Services Group Inc., KeyCorp and other large banks that have said in recent days that they won’t impose monthly fees on debit cards. None of those banks said they made their decisions because of the outcry over Bank of America’s fees.

“We looked at all options and quickly decided it didn’t fit with our overall strategy,” said David Bowen, who runs the consumer-product business at Cleveland-based Key, which ranks among the 20 largest banks in the country.

Sounds good, right, they made a logical decision that it wasn’t in the best interest of the bank or its customers.  But read on.

Chase was one of the first big banks to explore monthly fees on debit cards. The bank began testing monthly fees of $3 in Wisconsin and Georgia in February. Those tests are scheduled to end in mid-November and won’t be renewed or expanded for now, said the person familiar with the bank’s plans.

For now.  Clearly they are keeping this option open and the timing makes it highly unlikely it ISN’T in response to the negative publicity.

Chase loses customers safe-deposit box

This is the first I have heard of any bank losing someones safe-deposit box.  Perhaps it happens all the time, I don’t know, but that it happened at Chase is not at all surprising.

It seems that my safety deposit box is lost. I have both keys to my safety box, yet Chase is claiming it is closed. I have asked them several times to provide me with documentation that proves my signature. They have not been able to produce any such document. Just now I had a call from a chase attorney telling me that she would call me on Friday with answers.

How can this happen? My deceased mother’s jewelry, the jewelry that my father gave me, the legal property documents for my mother’s house, and many other valuable gold and diamond pieces are all gone.

If you can’t win friends, buy them

Did Chase just give up winning friends by actually being a good bank and making customers happy?

As reported by the Wall Street Journal (Chasing Friends, Banks go Social, 10/25/11), Chase is holding a sweepstakes with a grand prize of $1,000,000 and the only thing you have to do to enter is to “like” them on Facebook.

As part of an advertising and marketing campaign around its Chase Freedom credit card, the New York bank hosted a sweepstakes, ended Sunday, for users who “like” the card’s page on social-networking site Facebook. The “like” function allows users to signal something they are interested in to other friends and users. The grand prize was $1 million, while $500 was given away each hour from Oct. 3 to Oct. 23.

 

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