Monday, October 31, 2011

Caution: Sometimes When You Close Your Account at Chase It's Not Actually Closed (How Else Are They Going to Keep Wringing Overdraft Fees Out of You?) | Slog:

Remember how I said closing my account at Chase was really easy? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. A week or two later, I'm going through the mail and there's all this mail from Chase—overdraft notices for my Chase checking account. Which is supposed to be closed. The notices are for two debit card transactions and two auto-pay electronic checks. Instead of the payments not going through, like you would expect of a closed checking account, all four were paid by Chase, which then added an overdraft fee of $34 to each one, meaning $136 in overdraft fees. So I called Chase's 1-800 number and spent about half an hour arguing with them on the phone, and they kept telling me that while they had received my "request" to close the account, the account had not been closed, and that if I wanted to close it I had to go to the branch in person, which I kept saying I'd already done. At the end of the call he said, "Thank you for choosing Chase."