I have been a customer of Washington Mutual Bank for the past 5 years. I am a simple working class guy in Seattle not a Techno Millionaire. My paychecks are automatically deposited I have not had a lapse in employment since I have been with Wamu.
Recently Chase Bank took over Wamu in Washington and I had some reservations and almosted closed my checking and savings acconts prior to the acquisition but I did not.
This issue took a few months to manifest before I realized what had happened by then it was too late.
I have two credit cards with Wamu along with my checking and savings. I am a techno guy and I travel a great deal for my job so I do not really do snail mail. I see my mail once a month if I am lucky. I have all of my credit cards on Auto Pay for the simple idea that I will not miss a payment.
Now here comes the fun part.
Chase's IT department moved the credit card portion of the Wamu site first which I did not worry about but I should have. What they did was break the auto pay that was setup under the Wamu site so my payment did not get made. I was never contacted I have scoured through over 1200 emails looking for some notification but no luck.
Consequently Chase raised the interest rate on one of the cards. The one of course with the highest balance to 29.99 percent. On a 6,000.00 balance I am now paying 155.00 a month just in interest.
I of course called Chase as soon as I found out the payment was missed elaspsed time 15 days and I was so kindly told by the person on the end of the line. If you paid your bills you would not have this problem. I spent over 2 hours on the first call and 4 on the subsequent calls. No luck.
I am not looking for someone to fix this obviously no one cares. But I do need to vent and hopefully warn others to beware of this new practice. I am sure there are other victims out there former Wamu customers that this has happened to.
My next steps are to get out of Chase all together and put my money somewhere else but in the meantime they will be collecting good money on the next few payments from me.
I am now paying for something I did not do. Anyone can look at my records and see that up until the website move I never missed a payment and also paid at least 30% more than the minimum but sorry Chase I cannot afford to pay on the principal now.
I am open to suggestions.
Good luck in the new world of banking...
0 comments