HAYWARD, California – When it comes to your money, nothing is quite as disturbing as a scammer breaking into your bank account.
In a most unusual way, it happened to a woman in the northern California town of Hayward who found a stunning delivery in her mailbox.
It was unsettling – and almost surreal.
This woman suddenly received a stack of mail containing not one or two, but 70 Chase bank credit cards issued to 70 complete strangers, all on her credit card account. Even more troubling — there has never been a red flag when someone added 70 names to their account. Instead, the bank went ahead and issued all these fraudulent credit cards.
The stack of envelopes suddenly landed in Tina Kumar’s mailbox.
“I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous. I’ve never seen anything so outrageous,” she said. “I was blown away when I saw the envelopes. I didn’t know what was going on. And I’ve been in shock ever since.”
What was the most shocking? Each envelope contained two Chase bank credit cards, each with a different name on the front—and their account number on the back.
“This is Derrick White and Taylor Thompson,” Kumar said as she showed the tickets to our sister channel KGO-TV.
“I was just so stunned when I saw it. It was just amazing,” she said.
Immediately she called the number on the cards to find out what was going on and suddenly she realized that she had just activated the account!
For 70 strangers!
“And when I heard my card was activated, I panicked. It’s like, ‘Oh no, oh no,'” she said.
She called Chase’s customer service — and got more disturbing news.
“He said on March 25 someone logged into my account and added 70 names. And I said, well, how can this happen? And, and, and how come I wasn’t notified? Right?” Kumar asked.
The bank closed the account, gave her a new card and login.
Luckily no one had used the cards.
“I’m sure, you know, people waiting for it to activate would have just gone on a rampage with things charged,” Kumar said.
But nobody explained how 70 fraudulent credit cards slipped through a fraud detection at the bank.
“It’s outrageous. I mean how can you not have some red flags in your system to prevent this from happening? Where are the checks and balances?” Kumar asked.
“I can understand two, three, maybe four or five. But 70? Come on,” she said.
Chase promised a call from a manager. It never came.
“You’d think someone from senior management would get in touch with me and say, ‘Let me check this and I’ll get back to you, this should never have happened.’ Something like that would have calmed me down,” said Kumar.
“Why isn’t anyone contacting me? You know, at least apologize for what happened? For heaven’s sake tell me something, you know, but no, nobody seems to care,” she concluded.
Kumar contacted KGO-TV.
They asked Chase Bank how this happened and why no one brought Kumar’s attention to the fact that she had 70 new authorized users on her account.
The bank did not provide any specific answers, just general banking information, saying:
“For flexibility, we allow customers to add more users to their credit card accounts. Both a confirmation of each new authorized user and the additional card are sent directly to the account holder at their address. In this case, the unauthorized cards were blocked quickly after Ms. Kumar received them.
“Cardholders are not responsible for unauthorized charges made to their card and we encourage customers to notify us if they notice anything unusual with their account.”
Which was little consolation for Tina Kumar.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen next. It is frightening. Very scary,” she said.
Kumar says a Chase executive just called her to apologize and promised to investigate what happened.
She had just renewed that credit card when the 70 extra cards came in the mail. She still hasn’t activated hers.
Chase didn’t say if it changed its fraud detection systems to catch these types of crimes.
More information from Chase Bank on its security measures can be found here.
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