Consumer complaint received 2019-05-04
Product: Checking or savings account — Checking account
Issue: Closing an account — Company closed your account
Company: JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. (NY)

Complaint:
Here 's a chronological description of what happened. On the morning of Saturday, XX/XX/XXXX, I got a call from someone in Chase Bank 's fraud/security office telling me that some suspicious-looking activity had shown up on my debit card. She very quickly went through a list of these charges, around 15 or 20 in total, asking if I recognized them. Most of them I didn't. And most of these unrecognized transactions were payments to XXXX  for around {$15.00}, though a few were bigger, including the largest payment for {$210.00} to a cell-phone company that I don't use. I told her that these charges were indeed fraudulent and thanked her for catching them. She reassured me that we wouldn't be held responsible for this activity. Chase would proceed with its usual investigation, she said, and reimburse our account in the meantime. She also said she'd cancel my obviously compromised debit card and have a new one sent in the mail. I felt reassured.

On the morning of XX/XX/XXXX, I went through my online list of recent activity and noticed that one unfamiliar charge, for around {$56.00}, had been missed. This transaction was to another cell-phone company that isn't ours for a purchase we didn't make. So I called the Chase Customer Claims office and asked that this charge be added to the list of fraudulent ones. It was in this conversation that I first noticed a Chase employee treating me with suspicion. It didn't help that our phone connection was bad ( or that I'm hard of hearing ). Every Chase employee since then has treated me and my wife with a strong measure of defensiveness, obviously seeing us as having done something wrong.

My new debit card arrived in the mailbox on Saturday the XX/XX/XXXX. On Sunday I tried to activate it by phone but, strangely, got an automated message saying that the card was already active. On Monday morning I went into a local branch office here in XXXX XXXX XXXX, at XXXX XXXX XXXX, and asked a teller to activate the card. He told me that the card had been reported stolen and that I should destroy it and request another one.

I was in a hurry that day but returned the next afternoon, Tuesday the XX/XX/XXXX. In the interim, my wife had tried to use her debit card ( linked to the same checking account ) and had it declined. On Tuesday two different bankers at the same branch location, one of them an assistant branch manager, informed me that our accounts had been completely frozen by the fraud/security department and that we could not withdraw any money from them -- not from the checking account that had been affected by the hacking, and not from our two different savings accounts. As of this morning, XX/XX/XXXX, we still have received nothing in writing to this effect. We're told that a letter was sent when the freezing took place, but if that's true it hasn't arrived.

We didn't have any holdings at any other bank. All of our cash and cash savings was inaccessible to us, with no real explanation and no timeline for resolution. I asked one of the bankers in the local branch if this response seemed as strange to him as it did to me. I've been lucky enough that none of my debit cards has ever been hacked before, but I know cases like this occur all the time. After talking on the phone to the fraud department, he told me, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head, " No, it seems like they're looking into something else. '' We still don't know what that " something else '' is. On the morning of XX/XX/XXXX, we talked to three or four people after initially calling the Customer Claims hotline again. Finally my wife was able to speak to someone who stated, with more clarity, that a decision had been made to close all three of our accounts.

We still could not access any money in these accounts, she said, and could not come to receive a cashier 's check in person. Instead, in 7-10 business days, we should expect a check in the mail ( regular mail! ) in the amount of all of our balances, which will come to a total of just under {$90000.00}. And we are not allowed to open another account with Chase Bank now or in the future. The decision, this person declared to my wife, who was fighting back tears, is irreversible.

The only explanation provided was that too many " claims '' had been made on our account of late. The bank treated each of the fraudulent transactions as a separate claim, requiring a separate investigation, and I guess we can understand that 15-20 may seem like a high number. And yet they were all relatively small charges, most of them around {$15.00}, made over a span of a few days -- the time frame, obviously, when the debit card had been hacked. The total disputed amount comes to around {$500.00} : enough to make us want to resolve the problem and re-secure our accounts, sure, but not enough to make us think we were at risk of losing all our cash and savings. The bank 's reaction seems wildly disproportionate, which makes us assume that they've decided we are guilty of some greater misdeed that they haven't named. We can only conclude that they refuse to tell us anything substantial because they are still investigating us.

As of the evening of XX/XX/XXXX, our checking account, which had a balance of around {$8800.00}, and a small savings account for our XXXX-old daughter, which had a balance of {$8000.00}, had been XXXX out according to my Chase phone app. The previous balances had been subtracted for a " XXXX Check '' : I assume for the check we must hope to receive by mail. But at that point our savings account, with for us a sizeable balance of {$71000.00}, was still showing up as usual. We took screen shots to verify and can provide them as needed.

As of yesterday morning, though -- the morning of XX/XX/XXXX -- that large savings account no longer appeared at all in my online profile. I can not even locate the account history. It's as though the account, with all the cash we stowed away for several years as we prepared to have a child and then became new parents, had vanished overnight. We're told to expect this amount to come by check, in around 7-10 business days. In the meantime we are blocked from almost all the money we have in the world. We can use what little cash we happened to be carrying in our wallets, yes, and the money our parents can try to wire us, and our credit cards. And yet we still have bills to pay. And because our young daughter was diagnosed last month with XXXX XXXX XXXX, we have XXXX and equipment to buy.

Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief