Your assumption that these were scammers trying to pressure Chime to reopen their account contradicts explicit statements in the article:
> Chime confirmed that five of the anecdotes were well-founded; the company acknowledged making mistakes and returned each customers’ funds.
> The company confirmed, in interviews for this article, that it should not have closed Robertson’s account.
The article also addresses your claim that
> A few complaints like this aren't all that weird, bigger banks have way more complaints
by directly comparing the numbers, and Chime had by far the most (per customer):
> Of the 920 complaints filed about Chime, 197 were tagged as involving a “closed account.” The CFPB’s complaints are labeled inconsistently, and many of the other 723 also detail problems involving accounts that were closed against customers’ will. By comparison, Wells Fargo, a bank with six times as many customers and a lengthy recent history of misbehavior in its consumer bank, has 317 CFPB complaints tagged for closed accounts over the same time period. Marcus, the new online bank created by Goldman Sachs, with 4 million customers, has generated seven such complaints.
If I had to guess, it's growing pains combined with a "growth is more important than a few people accidentally getting crushed underneath" approach combined with pressure to do more about the fraud that led to this. If they're doing this and still accepting new customers, they're fully responsible for the pain they're inflicting.
At the very least, they could have tried to _actually_ make things right with the affected people:
> We have made efforts to make things right with these members.” (Robertson said that, beyond unfreezing her funds, Chime has not contacted her.)
This would mean compensating them for the time wasted, the stress and anguish caused, and financial cost (e.g. payday loans) incurred.