Credit Card Crisis!; or, My Fraud Investigation Nightmare with Chase Bank

image courtesy Gizmodo

On September 19th, I awoke to an e-mail from Chase Bank asking if I had made a declined $61.82 charge at a restaurant. I had not, so I logged into my account to see if there were any other transactions I should know about.

What I saw astounded me. My Amazon VISA card had been used at a series of restaurants across the last few weeks: Dave & Buster's, Chick-fil-A, Chase's Chicken, Applebee's, Taiga (a local hookah bar). The fraudulent transactions totaled over $800! But both Hayley and I had our cards, so evidently someone had "cloned" our cards, leaving us none the wiser. I only check my transactions when I get and pay the physical statement in the mail, and these had lined up just right to evade my notice for a while. I guess this guy has a taste for mediocre chain restaurants. But then, he does live in Tampa.

I immediately called in and reported it; our cards were cancelled, the $800 credited back to us, and all was well.

So I was not ready when, on November 5th, I received a phone call from Chase. They had completed their fraud investigation and determined that I was responsible for the fraudulent transactions. It was one of those moments where it feels like the world is dropping out from under you.

The basis of this appeared to be that the fraudulent transactions were made in the area where I live, in between valid transactions. My objection that this is exactly what would happen if your card was cloned fell on deaf ears. Like, obviously the cloner would live near where I live, and thus spend their money where I live.

They said I could appeal, so I did, but the $800 would go back on my statement, and I would be obligated to pay it unless and until I was validated on appeal.

I asked what I could do to prove my innocence. They suggested filing a police report and obtaining receipts. The former turned out to be useless; the investigators did nothing, because the restaurants wouldn't keep security footage that long. If only someone had told me that, oh, I don't know, back in September!? I've had my card ripped off two or three times in my adult life, but every time I just got the money back. No one ever told me that I might be investigated for fraud myself, or that I would need to prove I didn't do it, or that filing a police report was a thing you should do when your card was cloned.

Getting receipts turned out to be frustratingly difficult, and an Applebee's manager told me it would be pointless; it would just demonstrate that someone used my card. Which I already knew! I called in to Chase to ask follow-up questions about my appeal, they told me no one had been assigned to my case yet, and when they were, they would call me. Multiple people told me this.

So I was pretty surprised when I received a letter in December telling me Chase had "researched [my] fraud claim thoroughly" and found that I was responsible. I called the investigator, and she told me they didn't call people who didn't supply more documentation. I asked how one was meant to document that they didn't go somewhere! How can one prove that one hasn't gone to Applebee's!? They said I could re-appeal it, but I pointed out that the same result would come down if I couldn't submit something useful.

In a previous phone call, I had got the specific times of the transactions. Many were during the working day (the guy got breakfast at Chick-fil-A); many others were were after midnight. I asked if they thought I was really going to hookah bars at 1am when I was a teacher with a toddler at home. ("All you would do is look at a picture of me," I said at one point, "and you would say, 'This is a man who would never go to a hookah bar.'") I came up with the idea that I could submit the location data from my phone; they said sure.

So I e-mailed that in, screenshotting my movements and Hayley's from our Google Timelines every day there had been a fraudulent transaction.

Someone called me a couple days later to say they still thought I did it.

This person I got very mad at, though I hope I remained professional. "You're calling me a liar," I said. "No, Mr. Mollmann, I didn't say that." "If I say, 'I did not do it,' and you say, 'We think you did,' you are calling me a liar even if you don't use the words, 'You are a liar.'" It was quickly very clear to me that these "investigators" do not have much flexibility to make real decisions or training to make inferences from evidence. I hate to abuse the word "Kafkaesque," but I was beginning to feel like K. in The Trial. (Also this one I think was just dumb. "Well, it's not possible to impersonate the chip." "Were any of the transactions done with the chip, or just swipe?" "They were all swipe transactions." "!!!???" Like c'mon, what inference might you draw from that!?)

Why would I, after twelve years of paying this credit card in full every month (with, I think, two exceptions), suddenly turn to a life of crime? Why would I suddenly perform a series of transaction so far outside my usual patterns? Why were they suspicious of me, when in fact they were the ones that first pointed out something was up!?

Thankfully, my anger caused the case to get escalated to a manager, and the manager seemed competent and sympathetic. In addition to the Google Timeline screenshots (which the previous investigator had clearly not even understood what they were), she let me send in my and Hayley's teaching schedules, to show it was pretty unlikely that we would be jaunting off to Church's Chicken mid-day.

Finally, on December 23rd, the manager called me to say she had decided the transactions were not valid. ("It looks like you and your wife don't really do much after 7pm. Is that right?") I got the money back.

But I still think the whole experience is ridiculous. What if I hadn't had the idea of sending in the Google Timeline data? Or what if it hadn't existed? How can you prove you didn't go somewhere? The big sticking point was that the fraudulent transactions appeared in between valid ones, demonstrating the cards were still in our possession, but if a card is cloned, what else would you expect? How can a supposed fraud investigator not realize that? If I was going to try to defraud Chase myself, wouldn't it make more sense for me to go on a spree and then just claim my card had been stolen? According to what they told me, they would have been more likely to believe me!

Plus, this hurt them. If they had told me to file a police report in September, there's a chance the police could have found this guy and he would have been held responsible. Now, he's out there still doing his thing, and Chase is out $800. Like, the bank is literally the only people who lost here! (Well, except for all the undue and unneeded stress this caused me over three months.)

Anyway, can anyone recommend a new credit card?