Daniel says Chase promised him to retroactively give him rewards on past purchases after he switched account types, but somehow he ended up with a negative rewards balance. He says he’s got more than $600 in rewards coming to him, but Chase won’t budge and give Dave what he believes he’s entitled to. He writes:

A year ago, I noticed I had signed up for one type of credit card, but Chase ended up assigning me the wrong account type, so I wasn’t earning all the rewards I should have been. The CSR that I spoke to in December 2008 said that she would change the account so it was the right type, as well as retroactively crediting points for purchases made in the past. I also decided to redeem my rewards for cash at that point. A few weeks later, I received a letter but no check. The letter simply said that due to an error, my reward redemption could not be processed. I was busy, and the issue slipped my mind, so I didn’t investigate further.

Fast forward to now. I get my statements online, and so I usually don’t read them; I just read over the summary detailing the charges (which does *not* show any rewards history). Imagine my surprise when I noticed my reward balance was negative. I went back through the statements until I got to the January 2009 statement. It showed that I had redeemed rewards (which I never received) and also showed the “courtesy” adjustment that Chase decided to make to my rewards balance: $-277.42! I called customer service today, and they could not explain:

1) Why my statement said I redeemed rewards when I never received them.

2) Why the “courtesy” adjustment was made. I was changing my account to one with a better rewards program, so if anything, the adjustment should have been positive.

Not only did they have no explanation, they told me that my rewards that I had earned were gone and there was nothing they could do about it since the matter had already been handled and closed.

I don’t know who to contact or how to follow up on this, so I’m hoping you guys have some experience or ideas on how to deal with this… I normally wouldn’t care this much, but the amount of rewards that Chase owed me was pretty substantial: the January 2009 statement showed that I had a reward balance of $662.58. Now Chase is telling me it’s gone and they refuse to do anything to try to fix it or explain what happened.

Does anyone have any tips for Daniel to win this paper chase?

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