I was still very new and fiscally irresponsible to the whole personal finance scene when my father passed away, so I added my mother to my Chase checking account to help me keep track of my money. As the years went on my nieces also came of age to get their own bank accounts and steadily build them up, which my mother also helped with. Up until now there's been absolutely zero problems.
However, a couple of days ago I was checking my balance to plan for this month's bills and frivolous purchases when I noticed that nearly $1,200 had been transferred out of my primary account for "OD Collections". Long story short one of my nieces had overdrawn her account by that amount, and because my mother's name was on both that account and mine Chase decided to pull the overdrawn amount from me. I received no text message, no email, no phone call, nothing to let me know that I was suddenly down over a grand. Nor was anything even remotely close to this process explained to myself, my mother, or my nieces when our accounts were set up.
Thankfully my mother was able to pay me back immediately and my niece (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson, as did I. Chase was completely unapologetic and unhelpful during the entire process of trying to find out where my money went, so I think I will be throwing 20+ years of business with them out the window for another institution.
I'm not looking for sympathy or even advice really, unless it's on a new bank/credit union, I just want to warn people about the dangers of sharing your bank account(s) with even the most responsible of family members that the bank may not freely disclose.
(Edit: To clarify, I'm aware that this wasn't any "shady, under-the-table" dealing by Chase and they were likely just doing what's natural to a bank. I'm just pissed about the complete lack of communication both in helping me figure out what happened and in their refusal to sent notification about the transfer of funds to either my mother or myself.)
Submitted January 05, 2019 at 08:39AM by Valdanos http://bit.ly/2FdAh3A
