Living with Chase (Tips)

Don’t fall for scammers fake Chase texts to your cell phone telling you your account is suspended. If you received one of these, call the number YOU KNOW is for Chase Bank, not the one in the text message.

As of Feb 22, 2010, the new rules from the Credit Card Act of 2009 are in full effect.  Here are some of the things that your bank should be doing differently:

  1. Your credit card company must send you a notice 45 days before they can increase your interest rate, change certain fees (such as annual fees, cash advance fees, and late fees) that apply to your account, or make other significant changes to the terms of your card.
  2. If your credit card company is going to make changes to the terms of your card, it must give you the option to cancel the card before certain fee increases take effect. If you take that option, however, your credit card company may close your account and increase your monthly payment, subject to certain limitations.
  3. For example, they can require you to pay the balance off in five years, or they can double the percentage of your balance used to calculate your minimum payment (which will result in faster repayment than under the terms of your account).
  4. Your monthly bill should including information on how long it will take you to pay off your balance if you only make the minimum payment.
  5. Your credit card company cannot increase your rate for the first 12 months after you open an account.
  6. When your interest rate increases, it should only apply to new charges.
  7. You must explicitly opt-in to allow over-limit transactions to go through.  DON’T DO THIS!
  8. If your credit card company requires you to pay fees (such as an annual fee or application fee), those fees cannot total more than 25% of the initial credit limit.

If Chase breaches these new rules in any way, be sure to call them on it.

IMPORTANT TIP: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR CHASE’S NEW (POST CREDIT CARD ACT OF 2009) OVERDRAFT PROTECTION.  YOU DON’T NEED IT.  They have been running a fear campaign, sending repeated letters, and having their bank stuff harass customers to try and get them to sign up for overdraft protection.

The quality of customer service at Chase branches varies highly.  One branch may have excellent personnel while another may be horrid, as evidenced by this set of yelp reviews for Chase branches in San Jose, CA.  Use Yelp or another service to find the best rated branch near you to bank at.

21 Comments

  • By 311kid, May 6, 2010 @ 9:28 am

    hey bro! i like your site it is funny and nice to read some dumb actions between the government and private sectors..
    Anyhow leme share to you my experience with Chase/JP Morgan/XWAMU.. I was one of their customer service rep. and I tell you… WE SUCK!
    their team leads sucks! their QA sucks! how much more their managers?? anyhow.. leme tell you that JP MORGAN is venturing here in the Philippines especially Cebu and of course Cebuanos are intelligent people compared to Tagalogs, so they settle down to on of the IT locations here to cut expenses on the labor because.. they are just paying an estimate of $400-$500 per month for each reps that worked for them.
    So when I was still a CS rep. for JP morgan I experience americans crying over because Chase had blocked their card, for no reason at all, you know why?? just for a verification issues. They want me to verify if the owner purchased a TV set or used the card to a gasoline station that is 3 miles away from their work place. It can inflict damage to the users, but what I did was to unblock it with out verifying fully the customers as per their process cause it sucks! and I pity the american callers. So i sacrificed my professionalism over the sympathy of the card user because I believe I wasnt working for them but for the customer who needed my assistance. Well even though I never passed any Metric when I was working for JPMC at least I never had a guilt in my mind.

  • By SRC, September 14, 2010 @ 6:05 am

    The maintenance message on the site no longer pretends to be scheduled, it just says that its down and they are working to bring it up. We do payroll processing through Chase, and you can imagine what the stress is if you can’t pay people. Of course, it doesn’t help if the site is consistantly under maintenance (they had the same issue last month). Incidentally Bank of America seems to be headed in same direction. Site is not out, but on one machine has completely changed its look (scrolling lon text page) while continuing to work on others.

  • By Bob, September 14, 2010 @ 8:03 am

    I came here because someone said you have information on the outage, you do not.

    Terror of terrors the website is down! I went to a branch this morning and everything you want to do online can be done there. A little busy this morning but not bad.

    I guess my question is, if you don’t like the bank why don’t you just change banks? This seems like an awful lot of effort and I can’t see it ever even slightly bothering Chase Bank.

    As far as their “customer service rep” above, his post reminds me of the old Star Trek Harry Mudd who “everything he says is a lie”. If “I tell you… WE SUCK!” – why would you care what this POS has to say?

  • By bon scott, September 14, 2010 @ 8:14 am

    Just so you know, the automated phone line works. I had the number programmed so I do not not it. Just got my balance.
    PS it is bad the website is down. Worse is no business media has picked up the story. are they just cheerleaders?

  • By admin, September 14, 2010 @ 8:18 am

    The level of ignorance in this comment is a appalling.

    I can’t vouch for what someone told you. We have the only information available, which is only about the existence and duration of the outage. Chase has yet to publish any official word on what is going on.

    Everything that is done online can not be done in a branch. For instance, automatic payments.

  • By Chase Sucks Former Employee, October 6, 2010 @ 7:45 am

    Former 12 year employee at Chase in California. Mortage Retail, my manager would play golf four days per week. Monday morning meeting he would put everyone down then go play golf. He was getting a cut off each sale, his manager salary, Regional bonuses and he was giving his buddy all the house deals then having him split the commission under the table. What a racquet. The worst management I have ever seen. Good old boy sytem and if you complained you were fired. Chase what a joke!! Oh yea manager refused to hire black people and he got away with it..

  • By cj, October 7, 2010 @ 3:15 pm

    This sounds like a company in Dayton Ohio called Dayton Power & Light. Worst place to work. Had a Witch for boss in Human Resources. Did everything that she could to make life miserable for all of us. I ended up getting fired and she embarrassed me as much as she could when she walked me out the door. I had done nothing wrong. She just loved to have the POWER!!! You would not believe the laziness, underhanded dealings that came from her. She didn’t like anyone who wasn’t up to her standards like people of color and people with an accent. Everyone called her Hatchet Woman behind her back. And if the shoe fits, just wear it. Glad I am away from there.

  • By Chase Employee, October 8, 2010 @ 12:25 am

    Sad to say, I work for Chase as an assistant manager. Ever since the merger I’ve been worked like a dog. I barely get days off and when I am sick, I am still force to come in to work. I was told by my doctor to stay home because I had a bad flu, but my manager made me come in. HR is useless because they report any complaint from you to the management and district manager. There are constant threats from the manager that you are replaceable. I know many people who have gone on medical leave due to the stress cause by Chase. Sadly for me, unless I am in my deathbed, I will have to drag myself to work. Everyday is a constant struggle to go into work, if I look sad or I am not smiling then they tell me ‘as a manager, you need to show you are happy working at Chase’ so I put on a happy face. If i did not have my love ones to comfort me when I came home, I probably would have hung myself already.

    I needed to share this because I feel like we have no one to help us.

  • By CHASE Employee, October 16, 2010 @ 3:06 pm

    you need to speak to your manager becuase everything youve just said has never even been heard of at my branch. its not the company that sucks its your manager

  • By Chase Employee, December 15, 2010 @ 10:19 am

    I have to say, as a Chase employee, I love it. I used to work at a Community Credit Union, and while Chase has a few more fees, to me, it’s worth it. Yes, I don’t have mortgages or loans through them, but as far as the benefits for checking accounts.. the debit card rewards, online bill pay, text alerts, iphone app, quickdeposit, and quick pay.. why not? The credit union didn’t have any of that.
    And as far as the comments complaining about their managers, I’ve never had that problem. The branch I work at has an amazing staff, the ABM is hilarious. They have all been there for 4+ years. The ABM is currently at 10 years.
    My husband was banking at the Credit Union I worked at, until we moved. He has been banking at Associated, but for the past 6 months has been wanting to switch to Chase. The only reason he hasn’t yet is because he is impatient and doesn’t want to wait for his direct deposit to take effect again.
    And as far as ODP, yeah you don’t need it, I didn’t sign up for it. But I have seen multiple customers glad they have it.
    Just thought I’d throw in the other side of things.

  • By admin, December 15, 2010 @ 10:41 am

    Thanks for your comment. As I’ve pointed out before, quality of service (according to services like Yelp) varies greatly from branch to branch and I think customers can have hugely different experiences based on the competency and friendliness of the staff of a particular branch. Sounds like you are lucky to work for a good branch. I’d challenge you to read some of the stories on our site having to do with Chase telephone customer services to see why a lot of people are unhappy with Chase.

  • By Jack Chasebankhater, December 25, 2010 @ 12:44 am

    Just thought I would throw this in there, in the year that I have had chase bank, I’ve probably been charged at least 6 hundred dollars in late payments, prolonged overdraft fee (which looks illegal as hell), interest and other various bank fees that I can’t even catch up, I think they did this on purpose. I closed the account… I hate that bank and hope one day it goes under. I hate the fact that we have to pay fees and stuff so they can pay their high end customers’ interest on accounts that have tons of money in it since Chase doesn’t have the actual money to do it. The whole system sucks, Chase is just a “bank” model of the whole thing.

  • By Jessica, February 11, 2011 @ 1:06 pm

    I am having a problem with Chase, any advice? We applied for a loan modification with Chase, after filling out lots of paperwork, we were denied for having too much income. We cannot refinance because of the value of the home. Thats not even the real problem, Chase stopped letting us pay our mortgage online as soon as we applied for the mod. So we have to mail in a check or take it to the branch to pay. Even after being denied we were unable to pay online. Now, several months later we are unable to even access our account online at all. It will let us log in and show the last 4 numbers of the account #, but it says that the details of our account are unavailable online and to call a 800#. When we did they said they would fix it in a few days. They never did and over a month later we cannot access our account. I feel that Chase is making it harder for us to pay our mortgage so they can hit us with fees. The day they stopped allowing us to pay online was the DAY THE PAYMENT WAS DUE. We got no notice except for a Chase message that you can only view when you log in, not an email. So when I checked my bank account and found the payment had not been withdrawn I checked Chase and found the message. I would have been hit with a late fee had I not checked my checking account balance. It normally would come out automatically. I had to send a check and it barely got there before the 15 day grace period. I think this is very shady and does not seem like it should be legal. Now I am not only ineligible for a mod, but I cannot have automatic payments, I cannot access my account at all and so I do not know if they actually receive my payment until I get a statement from them.

  • By Robert Sharp, August 2, 2011 @ 10:50 am

    I was having text messages sent to my phone saying my chase account has been suspended. I went to my branch and talked to the manager but she wasn’t of any help. Is there any way you could give me a phone number to call. I have called the 1-800 number on the back of my card but all i get is a dial tone. Thank you in advance.

  • By Amanda, September 19, 2011 @ 11:57 am

    I love your site! I thought WAMU was bad, Chase is so much worse! My latest debacle is when Chase lost a $2000 business check deposit of mine. To make things worse, I had to go through over 3 months worth of harassment by them in order to prove I was who I was and that I wasn’t making the story up. They made me feel like a criminal!

    Thanks Chase! 🙁

  • By Dave, September 23, 2011 @ 2:47 pm

    Sept 23 and it looks like the site is down again?!?!? Chase sucks worse than ever and it’s always been bad.

  • By Alan, October 2, 2011 @ 7:41 am

    I have recent experienced the suckiness of CHASE when they terminated my business credit card account by informing me that my account was closed via a message on account web page. Seems I had a card payment to CHASE returned by my checking account credit union due to a transfer error coming from BOA. BOA provided me with an apology letter from the office of the CEO of BOA and BOA took full responsibility for the money failing to be transferred into my credit union checking account as was automatically supposed to happen. BOA went so far as to refund all fees thqat I incurred with the issue to the amount of $535.00
    Non the less, I sent the letter over to CHASE but to no avail. I have now re-sent everything to the office of the CEO of CHASE and we will see what happens.

  • By Guamer, February 18, 2012 @ 3:44 pm

    Thanks for this site, I googled something along the lines of “why is Chase so successful, even though they suck so bad?” I really like WaMu, but cancelled after they went Chase. I use Amazon all the time, so I applied for the credit card…it took forever to setup because of my previous chase online account. Now I’ve got a Mazda lease and apparently they are managed by Chase as well and apparently the online process is designed to take several days to setup. If there was any reasonable alternative, I would avoid Chase in every instance.

  • By TC, July 7, 2012 @ 10:37 am

    These trolls that claim to be Chase employees and love working for them – are hilarious!!! That place is HIDEOUS and any honest person knows it. This is the shadiest, most underhanded excuse for a bank – ever! ANYONE, employee or customer, that says the love this corrupt mess is either insane, a liar or part of the scheme. GET as FAR away from CHASE as you can! NEVER EVER use this bunch of retards for anything!

    Thought this crap just happened to me – but I am seeing now that it’s a systemic problem. Chase’s core values = FRAUD and DECEPTION.

  • By Terri, July 16, 2013 @ 7:27 am

    Chase is the worst credit card I have, and I have 5. Stick with Capital One. Chase has stuck me with a 29% APR that they won’t lower no matter how much my credit improves, they won’t dispute late payments for you on your credit report. I don’t even know why they have a customer service dept. it’s not like they do anything to help. I hope Capital One buys them out one day.

  • By james troli, July 1, 2015 @ 11:16 am

    chase employees are awful, rude and incompetent. me and my wife just spent over 4 weeks and it feels like 100’s of hours of our time being transferred around and lied to. i don’t think many of there employees even where paying any attention to what i was saying it was a waste of my time and theres. The where just wanting in till it was time to go home. MY request was a simple information request about a check that we did not get. At any other company this take at the most a 20 minutes. what did work was calling the CEO number 212 270 1111. They will try to transfer you to a call center where the employees are again awful, rude and incompetent. Do not let them transfer you. Demand that the person that answer the phone updates you about the status of you case. the will lie to you and hang up on or put you hold. you may have to call a couple of times. this is the only thing that works. only till this CEO number is tied up will any of the departments help you. its sad i had to do that but no one else will help unless the people that answer this number time is taken up. my time is just as important as there. the should improve there customer service if the don’t what people calling the CEO number. Again do not let them transfer you. make the person who answer the phone get involved. also other numbers i got are tony garder at 614 422 0784 she is 1st level manger who helped me after 8 days. also call anthony M. at 813 584 3108 he is at security and tell him you want him to get involved because there customer service is so poor. The government should break this bank up. my wife is nurse and i am Veteran of the first gulf war who works nights to help to pay for my wife’s school to become a NP. if any of these employees got this level of customer service from me or wife it would be criminal. they should feel ashamed. we deserve better customer service.

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