You always hear about big business screwing the little guy. You hear about corporations preying on the poor and uninformed. The majority of us agree that this happens and are seldom shocked to see it come up again and again in the news.
It's unfortunate, but we are resigned to the fact that the chips are stacked against us; that large corporations with their phalanxes of lawyers can do as they please with no consequences. This is what the Occupy Wall Street protests are about. This is what the banking reform bills are supposed to be about. This is one of the many reasons why the average person is disgusted with the state of the way things are in America today.
While we all agree that big business is out to screw the little guy, we are nonetheless shocked when the hand of unfairness reaches out and personally smacks us in the face with a blatant abuse of power. Such was my shock when I recently saw that Chase had stolen $96 in fees from my "Free Checking" account. "Stolen" is the exact word for what Chase did to me.
According to dictionary.com, one of the definitions of "steal" is as follows: "To take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, especially secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch"; a bank stole from his account. The deceitful nature of what it did makes my blood boil.
Back in 2009, I received a nice little postcard from Chase offering a $100 match if I opened a Chase account with $100 of my own money.
A few weeks after receiving the card, I drove down to the bank and put $100 of my hard-earned cash into a "Free Checking Minimum Balance of $100" account as advertised on the card.
For years my money sat in the account, and I was content to let it stay there, enjoying the fact that I had a Chase account if I ever needed one. Every now and then, I added to it or wrote a check against it. It wasn't an account that I used, and I didn't monitor it. Why should I monitor it? The minimum balance was $100, and I had that more than covered.
Fast forward to Oct. 22, 2011.
I had some free time so I decided to finally get Chase online banking. When I signed on, I immediately noticed that I had three $12 service charges. "How could this be?," I asked myself.
I had this account for years and never did anything with it, and the balance always stayed the same. Why was I being charged now? What was going on? The hand of unfairness had taken a swipe at me, and I was just beginning to feel the sting.
So I call Chase and the service representative tells me that all the "free checking" accounts were changed over to "total checking" because of "some federal regulation." He used the phrase "some federal regulation" to describe the reason why my free checking account had turned into a money sucking succubus of an account.
He then went on to explain the three ways that I could avoid the $12 service fee: 1) maintain a $1,500 balance, 2) have a direct deposit of at least $500 per month or 3) maintain $5,000 balance across a number of different accounts, loans or mortgages with Chase.
I went from having a "free checking cccount" that was required to have a $100 balance to having a "total checking account" that required a minimum balance of $1,500.
All without my approval or say and all because of "some federal regulation" that had apparently forced Chase to make this change. I was starting to smell something that had the stench of a scam. Have you ever heard the term "bait and switch?" Well if not, here is a form of it. After my protests, the service representative agreed to refund the three charges and we hang up. Nice guy.
So now I immediately go back to my online statements and, upon further examination of the crime that Chase committed against me, I now see that the original three charges are just the tip of the iceberg. The charges began all the way back in March of this year. It has been steadily charging me $12 each and every month since March for a total of eight.
I call back. I'm angry. I've been cheated. My pocket has been picked.
I speak with a service representative who listens for a good while and then passes me on to a supervisor who informs me that Chase sent me a notice of the change. I ask where the notice was sent, and she does not tell me. I ask why the change wasn't emailed to me. She says Chase sends the notifications by mail. I ask why I didn't get a call or a text. I ask why an email with a subject line with huge font explaining that I am now liable for a $12 service fee per month wasn't sent to me.
Surprisingly, I didn't get an answer.
I didn't get an answer because the answer isn't "PC" and won't show up in any of Chase's cute commercials that it has been playing lately. In short, the answer is that it has designed its system so this happens. It did it on purpose.
It was banking (excuse the pun) on charging its unknowing customers these fees. Chase does not gain by letting me know about the fees so it didn't make an effort to inform me. If I didn't finally catch it, it would have bled me dry forever with its fees until I overdrafted, and then it would have charged me for that as well. The supervisor agreed to refund four out of the eight fees that I was charged. For the four fees that Chase wouldn't give back, which amounts to $48, it has created an outspoken critic that will tell the world forever of its crooked behavior.
My mistake was that I trusted the original agreement that I had with Chase. My mistake was that I didn't check its every move month to month and monitor them for crooked behavior. I should have treated them like a parolee with an ankle bracelet. My mistake was one of trust. Essentially Chase has shown me that it cannot be trusted and my money is not safe there. It builds walls and vaults to keep the crooks out, but what happens when the crooks are actually inside the bank?
Chase has shown me through its actions that it will defraud its clients. Chase stole $96 from me. It robbed me of this money through an elaborate scheme to draw me in with a teaser account and then switched it on me without my knowledge. It made the minimum required effort to inform me of the changes that were enacted and then sat back and began picking my pocket. The gulf between the account I signed up for ($100 minimum balance) and the account that it switched me into ($1,500 minimum balance with $12 per month service fee) is staggering. It is a crook.
How many others have been taken by this criminal organization? How many more have been taken in similar schemes by organizations just like it?
More importantly what can be done about it? How many of you were allowed to overdraft on your account more than once in a single day, allowing these crooks to tack on unbelievable fees?
Why does the law allow Chase to commit these crimes against American citizens?
Why are these corporations allowed to steal from us? They only remain in existence because our tax money bailed their over-leveraged corrupt asses out of the hole that they dug for themselves.
I, for one, am outraged, and I don't believe that I'm the only one.
Max Scholder is an MBA student at UF.
