Consumer complaint received 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Product: Checking or savings account — Checking account
Issue: Managing an account — Funds not handled or disbursed as instructed
Company: Chime Financial Inc
State: LA

Complaint narrative:
From XX/XX/XXXX to XX/XX/XXXX there were six transactions, all to XXXX or XXXX XX/XX/XXXX, for which I was double billed, coming to a total of {$160.00} in unauthorized and fraudulent charges. When a purchase is made with XXXX, they apply an authorization hold to the account, then the actual charge is processed, then XXXX removes the authorization hold, usually within 24 hours. For these specific six charges, that's the way it happened, but Chime never returned the money to my account once the authorization holds were lifted and XXXX released the funds. 

I brought this to their attention for XXXXwo of the six charges that I noticed initially by filing a dispute for double billing. I provided the dates and amounts with the statements showing one of the charges as " XXXXXX/XX/XXXXPending '' or " XXXX XX/XX/XXXX Pending '' ( although the charge was no longer pending and had successfully been fully processed and completed ), and then the duplicate amount charged as either " XXXX XX/XX/XXXX '' or " XXXXXX/XX/XXXX '', showing that these were clearly duplicate and identical charges for the same single purchase, but they denied my disputes. 

When I asked them why they had been denied, they claimed that XXXX had double billed me and they said that in order to refund my money for the duplicate charges, I would have to provide documentation from XXXX showing that they had, in fact, lifted the temporary authorization charges. 

So I reached out to XXXX only to discover that there is no way to speak to anyone over the phone about any sort of account concern. The ONLY method by which one can communicate with XXXX is via the Help portion of their app through email. They have no telephone number at all NOR any real time chat feature to hash out any problems. 
That's when I realized that the likely reason these duplicate charges were appearing on my account only for purchases made through XXXX was that it is so difficult to acquire and provide the documentation that Chime claims they need in order to remedy the problem. It is such a headache to get this documentation from XXXX, that most people probably just give up and stop pursuing the refund, IF they even notice the duplicate charges in the first place. 

At that point, I decided to check to see if these two incidents were isolated, or if this had happened on any other occasion in my account and just gone unnoticed. So I looked through my previous 4 months bank statements, and I discovered an additional 4 instances of being double billed for charges made to XXXX and XXXX XX/XX/XXXX 

After a couple of weeks of dancing around in circles trying to communicate with XXXX, requesting that they provide me with some sort of documentation showing when the temporary authorization holds were placed and when they were removed, I eventually convinced the AI to forward my requests to a human who was able to look into the specific charges in question and confirm to me that in each instance, the temporary authorization holds had, indeed, all been lifted, and that my bank should have returned those funds to me within a maximum of 10 days after the charge .... but for these 6 charges, that had not happened.

So I contacted Chime again to file a rebuttal for the two disputes that they had previously denied, and to file disputes for the additional four double-billed charges I had discovered. So far, they have only refunded one of the six double-billed charges, and nothing has been done about the other five, leaving {$150.00} in funds wrongfully removed from my account. 

This is infuriating because I am certain that they can see that XXXX has lifted these temp authorization holds, but they still want the give the run-around and force me to acquire documentation showing this fact, when I'm sure they know that being able to actually acquire this documentation from XXXX is almost impossible. 

The five remaining outstanding instances of double-billing are as follows : on XX/XX/XXXX a charge made through XXXX to XXXX XXXX XXXX for {$30.00} ( Chime dispute ref. # XXXX ) on XX/XX/XXXX a charge made through XXXX to XX/XX/XXXX XXXX XXXX XX/XX/XXXX{$42.00} ( Chime dispute ref. # XXXX on XX/XX/XXXX a charge made through XXXX to XXXX XXXX XXXX for {$27.00} ( Chime dispute rebuttal ref. # XXXX ) on XX/XX/XXXX a charge made through XXXX to XXXX XXXX XXXX for {$31.00} ( Chime dispute ref. # XXXX on XX/XX/XXXX a charge made through XXXX for a trip to XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX/XX/XXXX {$22.00} ( Chime dispute rebuttal ref. # XXXX )

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation