Dear Chase:
I appreciate that wire fraud is a common illicit activity, especially with hacked bank accounts. I can even understand, if you see a first-time overseas wire transfer that you might be worried that it’s fraudulent and both lock the online account and block the transfer.
But if you do that, and then try to contact me to let me know that there’s a problem, I would also expect that:
- You provide more info to the person on the line (who happens to also be on that account) than that there’s a “profile” problem and that I should call back a given phone number. Mentioning that it has to do with a wire transfer does not seem to be a breach of privacy in such a case.
- Since it could have been just anyone claiming to be Chase and calling up and leaving a phone number to call back, if I call the customer service number from the back of a Chase credit card or some such, I expect the person on the other end of the phone will be able to see that there’s a problem, and either walk me through it, or transfer me to the right people, or even reconfirm the number I should actually call back.
Simply calling and leaving a cryptic message and a number to call, and meanwhile locking down my online access and not wiring the money is … well, not very service-oriented.
Oh, by the way, if that was going to be a potential problem, it also would have been nice if the Chase managers and account reps we talked to in an actual Chase Bank had warned us.
(All of the above is part of the reason we fled Chase for a local credit union when they bought out WaMu. Unfortunately, our excellent mortgage is with them, so we need to keep a presence — and, to their credit, they are capable of handling international wire transfers which our credit union is not.)