Robert got a confirmation email from Chase verifying that he’d paid $130 on a credit card account. Problem was, the payment he made was for $236.27, and the account listed with the $130 payment wasn’t his. He brought up the issue to Chase but was told to ignore it.

He writes:

This morning I received an automated email saying “Thank you for your electronic payment of $130 to your Chase credit card ending in ABCD” This is odd, because in checking my billpay, I made an electronic payment of $236.27 on the account ‘”WXYZ”. It seems for some reason I’m getting email reports from someone else’s card sent to me.

I confirmed all the headers on the email to make sure it was coming from chase.com and jpmchase.com and was to my main email, so it doesn’t seem to be a phishing attempt. Just a simple something broke in their database that needs to be fixed.

So I called. Initial support verified that indeed the card ending with ABCD is not attached to my name. They then passed me to fraud, who confirmed the same thing. They then passed me to the “internet department” who likewise said ABCD isn’t my account and that I must have received this fully-automated email “by mistake”. Their best recommendation was to “ignore it”.

Well, automated systems kinda don’t work like this or make simple errors – they process the data they are given. I’m very obviously receiving someone else’s confirmation emails. The solution seems to be to just sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I have no idea the fraud or identity theft risk here. I like the card (I use it for Amazon purchases and 3% back), but seriously “hope it goes away” seems to be a poor way to address something.

If someone out there is getting Robert’s payment verification notes, you might want to start forwarding to him, since Chase doesn’t seem to care too much about the anomaly.

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