A JPMorgan Chase customer who watched tens of thousands of dollars exit her account says she’s more upset with the bank than the scammers who made her a target.
Kristal Kuhn in San Diego says she recently received a phone call from someone pretending to work at Chase’s fraud department, reports FOX News 5.
Out of an abundance of caution, Kristal says she asked her daughter to Google the caller’s phone number, and the results showed it belonged to Chase.
At that point, the caller claimed they flagged a $2,000 transaction and would be sending an access code to Kristal.
Soon after giving the access code to the caller, Kristal says she looked at her accounts and saw that the thieves were moving money around, attempting to transfer a huge sum in one go.
Kristal says she immediately called Chase to freeze the transaction but was told she needed to visit a local branch. It took her about five minutes to get to a Carlsbad branch but no one was available to assist her.
Still on the phone with Chase, the lender said she could try again the next day because there was no one available to assist her, prompting her to rush to a Vista branch where she again received no help.
She abruptly left to visit a third branch in San Marco where her account was flagged, but the employees who called Chase’s back office struggled to freeze her account.
Eventually it was successfully frozen, after the thieves had already drained her account to the tune of $49,500.
“Had the accounts been frozen in the first five minutes when I asked for it to be frozen, we would not be – or even in the second bank, or even at the beginning of the third bank – we would not be in this situation, and now we’re out $49,000…
I am more angry with Chase Bank than I am with the scammers because of how much Chase Bank failed us as a customer.”
Kristal says she reached out to the FBI and filed a complaint with Chase but the lender refused to give her a refund, claiming that she approved the transaction.
US banking laws require lenders to reimburse victims for certain types of fraud, but not when customers are tricked into giving scammers access to their account.
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