JPMorgan Chase says a customer in Utah will not be reimbursed after scammers ripped $20,000 from her account while she was on vacation.
Kathryn England was in Florida when someone supposedly from the “fraud department” at Chase gave her a call, reports the NBC-affiliated news station KSL-TV.
The man on the other end told England that someone had wired $20,000 out of her account and to get the money back, she had to follow his instructions.
Motivated to get her money back, England followed all of the caller’s instructions, reading several verification codes to him that she received via text message. After a two-hour phone conversation, she was instructed to delete the Chase app from her device and wait for a call back – a phone call that never came.
“An hour went by. Two hours went by. I said, ‘Something is so not right.’ So, we went back to the hotel and called Chase.”
After speaking with the real Chase, England discovered she had been duped by a scammer who wired $20,000 out of her account.
Chase then denied her claim, as it’s not obligated to cover the loss due to what KSL-TV refers to as a loophole in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act.
The law typically protects people whose accounts are hacked or whose cards are stolen, but it does not cover people if they are duped by scammers into authorizing transactions.
Carla Sanchez-Adams, senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, says that due to limited protections in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, passed in 1978, such cases are now all too common for bank customers, particularly since the pandemic.
“It just impacts everyone, and they’re heartbreaking stories because there really are no protections…
What happened after 2020 in the pandemic, is that wire transfers are now available through digital banking. Whereas before you used to have to go in person into a branch to initiate large transfers through wire. And now, you know, you can set that up and do it online.”
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