Consumer complaint received 2023-06-14
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Trouble using your card — Credit card company won't increase or decrease your credit limit
Company: JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. (MD)

Chase is engaging in inconsistent, non-transparent, unfair, deceptive and abusive extensions of credit on its credit cards. I have 3 credit cards with Chase : Amazon XXXX, Freedom and Freedom XXXX. Chase has pushed its largely junk card, the Amazon XXXX, which is habitually plagued by all of Amazons sleazy, out of control, unfair, deceptive and abusive billing practices, and I believe has raised the credit limit on this junk card automatically without asking me if I wanted it, while it has done just the opposite on the card I use the most, the Freedom XXXX. Furthermore, whenever I have asked for a credit limit increase on the XXXX  card, Chase uses this as a pretext to try to force me to apply for the card all over again and extract a lot of personal information from me that it does not require when it raises the credit limit on the Amazon card. The only way I can avoid this abuse is to transfer the Amazon credit to the XXXX credit limit which I have done a few times. However, Chase does not openly advise its customers that it will do this and instead tries to force them to reapply for credit as for the first time on the Freedom XXXX card. 

Additionally, whenever I call the service number for the XXXX  card, I am subjected to a slew of irrelevant, canned recordings with no way to avoid them, wasting what little time I have to deal with abuses that should not exist to begin with. This is an obstacle to being able to communicate with the Unlimited card personnel. 

Finally, when I asked the person who said he transferred credit from the Amazon card to the XXXX  card, after he tried to take a complete credit application from me, why Chase was not reporting activity on the XXXX card which has the most activity on it, to credit bureaus, he said he did not know and that I would have to speak to someone else. He then transferred the call to more pre-recorded garbage I did not have time for, before another recording announced that no one was available to answer this question unless I hung on the phone 30 minutes or more to speak to someone because people who knew the answer to this question are in short supply and not readily available to explain their actions. Clearly, as part of being squirrelly with its inconsistent and abusive credit management, Chase also resists and imposes obstacles to its customers for explaining why it does not report activity on my most used card, or perhaps for any of my cards, to credit bureaus. 

Please investigate, monitor and effectively sanction Chase for these aforementioned practices. If it automatically raises the credit limit of one of its cards, it should at least offer to do so for all of its cards so that its customers have a fully transparent choice about how it is offering, not automatically assigning, credit. The kind of market manipulation that Chase routinely engages in, in for example, pushing Amazon sales and card usage, is repulsive. It should not be allowed to extract new personal information to raise a credit limit on any of its cards but go by the actual payment history of any particular card. With very few exceptions, many of which are due to the ephemeral inconsistencies of information presented or unjustifiably withheld in online banking and on statements, I have paid monthly balances in full on time or before they are due on all of my Chase credit cards for many years. Chase still has two parallel, incommunicative, payment systems within online banking, a source of constant confusion that Chase simply will not resolve. It should be sanctioned, but effectively, for its habitual repeat offenses in this regard that are a direct cause of confusion, overpayment, underpayment, etc., as the case may be. In the same vein of routine confusions, Chase does not print closing dates on its statements on all or any of its cards, while it should be forced to do so on each and every statement it prints for each of its cards. This should be a basic standard for any credit card statement of any bank operating in this country, without exception of the whining excuses of small banks and credit unions. Fairness to customers should be the reigning/reining standard, not size and ineptitude of any institution that issues a credit card.