Since the last thread a few months ago, I've been in contact with Chase a ton going back and forth, providing additional documents (each time takes a week of processing), and with holiday breaks, I can finally say the case has been resolved and closed. As of this week, we have been credited back all 132 charges and the total amount has been permanently refunded to our account.
tl;dr: we got all of our money back after my wife's card was fraudulently charged on Amazon a bunch. the biggest breakthrough was an email recapping a call I had with Amazon stating the orders went to a different state.
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To quickly recap, in the original thread, my wife's credit card was used multiple times over the course of 8 months on Amazon by someone else's account claiming to be my wife (totaling about $4400).
After the last thread blew up, we went through a ton of the suggestions including filing an Internet Crimes report with the FBI, following up with local police report, talking to the Chase executive office rep, etc. After the latest round of Chase rejections (including with the Executive office after filing a CFPB report), Chase stated the only proof they would accept is if Amazon would specifically state in an email that the orders were fraudulent. I've talked to Amazon multiple times up to this point and they're very selective on what they can disclose via Customer Service due to security reasons, so I felt like this was Chase asking for an impossible task to be accomplished.
However, I still called Amazon up again and when pleading my case with the representative, I asked her to look up a few charge IDs (the unique code after each charge that tells Amazon info about the order, including what account it's on) to prove my card was used fraudulently. When I was able to convince her, I asked if they could provide the contextual opposite of what Chase was asking for and instead of outright claiming fraud, if she could write in an email these orders were NOT going to the same address as my billing address and that they were going to a different state altogether. She agreed to do this and I was able to capture a few of the orders in an email I subsequently sent to Chase. I think we also got a bit lucky with this particular rep, because with other calls with Amazon, I didn't get as much detail in their emails.
This email led to a huge breakthrough in November, as I believe this email was proof enough to convince Chase that some fraud was occurring, they investigated and utilized their backchannel with Amazon and subsequently reversed some the charges that were listed specifically in the email. Over the course of the next few months, we had to provide a bit more documentation, but ultimately we were able to get everything reversed.
I did follow up with the police department after filing a report, but they said they forwarded the case to the local precinct in the state where the person lived, and I never heard back. I never heard back from the FBI either.
These were the most helpful things for this case I think we did in retrospect:
- Filing a CFPB report - This gave us a direct line of communication to Chase's executive office that investigates cases like this and also gave a single person that you can actually talk to over the course of the investigation. This was helpful as there were multiple updates and requests that Chase would need for further documentation, which the standard fraud process would have dismissed. Having someone you could talk to and ultimately convince there was fraud going on was instrumental.
- Keeping your own spreadsheet/analysis of the fraudulent charges - Having a single source of truth for everything really streamlined and helped to identify the total amount of fraud occurring, as well as making sure when I was being credited that I was getting everything back. Amazon charges are really hard to track because for each order, they can charge you multiple times depending on the shipment/merchant. For example, if you order 3 things, you could have 1 charge for 2 items and 1 charge for the last one. This and sharing an account with my family made it a nightmare to analyze and aggregate, but you can bulk download order history from Amazon and charges from Chase, so it was a matter of lining them up and greasing spreadsheet capabilities.
Thanks for the tips everyone that responded/DMd. I hope this helps others in similar situations!
Submitted January 16, 2022 at 01:30AM by stolenidentity858619 https://ift.tt/3nxHaBQ
