I’m in the midst of the biggest financial uncertainty in my life, and I’m livid.
On May 25th 2024, Chase invited my wife and I to an appointment at the local branch to discuss our renewing one of our investment accounts. The certificate of deposit (CD) was set to mature and we had the option of just withdrawing the money or renewing. We have a diverse portfolio of investments with different levels of risk, and the CD was an account that we were happy with. So, we renewed.
During that meeting, we also decided to add my wife to my accounts since we were recently married and wanted to have joint ownerships. It turns out that there was a mismatch in names with my wife’s IDs. Her maiden name was on some files, but the bank used her driver’s license for our proof of address. The license has her married last name, not her maiden name.
The bank agent did not catch this issue. And the banking system did not catch this issue early on. It accepted the IDs without any issues.
Fast forward to June 3rd and we receive an urgent communication from that bank agent that we have to come back into the branch to clear up an issue with the IDs. We also received an email on June 4th from Chase directly that our accounts were frozen due to “fraud activity”.
On June 4th, we went into the bank branch and resolved the issue by simply removing my wife’s name on the accounts. It made the most sense to remove her for now. Then we’ll fix up her documents before returning to Chase down the road whenever we’re ready. In that meeting with the agent, she called some internal Chase department and kicked off the process to unrestrict our accounts.
The next day on June 5th, the agent called us to confirm that our account has been unlocked and all the issues have been addressed. We were relieved.
But on the morning of June 6th, I noticed that our CD investment account disappeared. There was absolutely zero communication on what happened to it. In a panic, I called Chase’s fraud department, and they casually explained that they closed our CD on June 4th.
They closed our CD on the same day they informed us…
How absurd is that? Here’s the timeline of events.
- June 4th — Email informing us of frozen accounts and risk of closure
- June 4th — My wife and I enter the branch to fix the issue
- Also June 4th — Chase decides to close our account
- June 5th — We get contacted that our accounts are unlocked, but no one told us the CD was still going to be shut down.
There’s clearly a timing issue issue. Why was our meeting on the 4th futile? Why didn’t it fix the issue in time? Why was the decision to close our account made on the same day that we were informed via email? I acknowledge that we should probably have figured out our documents in advance, but it’s not like we’ve been married before so we’re new to these name changes. The initial entry of our IDs should immediately throw an error saying, “Mismatched names. Please resolve before continuing.” We should never have gone down this fraud route when there is no fraud at all. And why were our accounts unlocked but the CD was still shut down?
Now we are in a purgatory state, calling every number we can find to figure out where our money went. Wish us luck.
