If you're fortunate enough not to be a customer of JP Morgan Chase Bank, then you may not be aware of the problems they had with the chase.com website last week. It was down for something like 5 days.
Unfortunately, we have 3 accounts with them... 2nd mortgage (had been WaMu which Chase bought), credit card, and car loan (sold to them by Mazda credit). 2 of the 3 were due last week in the midst of the outage
Got the credit card payment in by phone via a human being on time without a problem, outside of a 15 minute wait. But I couldn't get ahold of a person on the mortgage side, so I had to use their "automated" telephone support... for which they charge a $15 fee. Outrageous, but I didn't want my payment to be late, that's a $35 fee. (I normally wait until the end of the grace period, that way the payment comes out of my 2nd paycheck for the month)
Site's back up, we've gotten numerous emails apologizing over and over for the inconvenience. And most say that they will waive any late fees.
This is where the "fine print" comes in. They won't give me the $15 phone charge back. See, it's technically not a "late" fee. Even though I had to resort to this with their site down due to no fault of my own -- which they acknowledge -- I'm now told I should have waited until the site was back up, accepted the late fee, and then asked for them to reverse it. Which they would have gladly done.
Right.
Did I mention, by the way, that during the course of the outage, my password got trashed by the web site? I was told it was up, but that wasn't entirely true, as I found out the hard way. So I couldn't have made the payment online anyway until it was too late.
So much for electronic banking. If they don't fix this, well then it's back to mailing them a check. Costs them more to process, but a $.44 stamp is much less aggravation to me.
Promises to fix all that went astray during their problem... and then using the fine print to weasel out of it. Wonder if Chase has BP as one of their clients?