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Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

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Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#141

Post by 0x5f3759df-i »

bdcravens wrote: post #122

Chase stole about $900 from me from an account I setup just for freelance income. This was during the pandemic when I had to take a 2/3 haircut in my day job to keep the company afloat (we did, and all is well now). Every time I'd try to reach out to try to get answers, I'd get bounced around among different foreign call centers. After months of trying to resolve it I just gave up. (I could and should seek legal reco…

Chase really has the worst phone customer service. I foolishly used one of their 0% interest promos to buy some hardware and when I was charged interest anyway due to their screwup in how my payment was applied he told me:

> “since you have enough money in your account to pay this off I don’t know why you are using this plan at all. These are intended for low income customers”

and did nothing to solve the problem.

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#142

Post by rglover »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #138
rglover wrote: post #111

This is why Bitcoin is ideal. You can hold and transfer any amount, any time of day, without fear of surprises like this. Would I use it as a primary cash account for my business today? No, because of the obvious exchange rate/price swings. But long-term, moving toward Bitcoin as a settlement layer (i.e., a modern SWIFT) would solve a ton of problems and avoid situations like this. The more people that do that/normal…

solana seems t be even better for that tech wise. but yea, bitcoin is incumbant here

Solana is centralized. The network should never go offline/have outages or be vulnerable to bad actors. At best, Bitcoin has the 51% attack problem which would require insane resources and convincing node operators to follow a fork of the network.

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#143

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

When I read these kinds of stories, and the comments on them, I feel it would vastly more useful for people to document positive interactions with financial services.

Am I shilling for banks? I hope not. It just seems that at this point anyone who imagines the banks are going to work for you, the customer, has not been paying attention and/or is delusional.

Finding out that SolarFlower Bank in Hometown, Your State has provided exceptional banking services is massively more useful than hearing, once again that BigBankCorp are terrible.

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#144

Post by jeff_carr »

CliffStoll wrote: post #86
dmoy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on the retiring! Are you still doing the hats & bottles or did you retire from that too?

Thanks D'moy! I'm still having fun with Klein bottles and other topological manifolds. Toying with immersions of the projective plane and several knot embeddings. At the moment, retirement mainly means "start taking out required minimum distributions". All the same, I wonder: How do you retire from a marginally profitable nano-business built upon glass mathematical shapes? How'd I ever reach 74 years old?

There are lots of us that made good money over the years and your books were important to lots of us.

Sell signed copies of your books for $1000 at the klein bottle store so we can buy them. Let us help you have fun in your retirement! (A signature or signed bottle would be awesome too.)

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#145

Post by benzible »

mijoharas wrote: post #127
benzible wrote: post #9

About 10 years ago a startup I co-founded had about $3M in a Chase account. We received a notification that they were closing our account within 30 days. We weren't able to get any information but I assume this was a KYC false positive. The only thing I can think of is that we had some investors from the Middle East. We had no problem withdrawing our funds but since then, I've opened another business account and a pe…

> I've opened another business account and a personal travel credit card with Chase Out of interest, why would you do that after your previous experience with them?

The Chase Sapphire card was rated as the best travel card. I had no idea that I had been flagged personally at the time I applied.

I can't remember why I chose them for a business account. At the time I was working under the assumption that this was a "lightning strike" type of event which could have happened with any bank. I'm more inclined to believe it's Chase-specific now, or at least more likely with Chase, esp. based on other anecdotes in this thread! I was also inclined to believe that most large banks are terrible. For example, I have experienced extremely poor customer service with B of A, and Wells Fargo is a very sleazy company. However, my experience with Chase is by far the worst I've personally experienced.

I'm a very happy customer of Mercury Bank for my current business, FWIW.

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#146

Post by bigstrat2003 »

smeej wrote: post #46
mminer237 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely exacerbated by being a big bank though. If I have a problem with my local bank, I can literally walk into the branch and probably just talk to a VP about it straight-away if needed.

This is even more true at a local credit union. Add in the co-op network of credit unions, where you can go to any branch of any of the member unions (50k+ branches last time I checked, but it's been awhile) and it's hard for me to understand why people bother with these big banks.

The only reason I'm not currently banking at a credit union is because my wife prefers banks. I can't understand why she does, but ultimately marital harmony is worth more to me than using a credit union. If it wasn't for that, I would never have left my credit union in a million years. They rock.

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#147

Post by pickledish »

otteromkram wrote: post #83
pickledish wrote: post #61

Another story about a startup and chase, from the person who founded hashicorp, it's a fun read: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story (edited since at first I remembered it being more negative about chase in particular -- but it's really just funny!)

Did you read to the end? > I want to make it clear that Chase could've been an excellent banking partner. I never gave them the chance. I never told them what my business does or what I'd use the money for. I never talked to anyone (besides saying what I needed to get off the phone). This story isn't a cautionary tale about Chase, it is rather recounting my naivete as a young, first-time startup founder.

Ah, you are right! it's been a while since I read the post, and I mis-remembered it as being more negative about chase than it was. I'll edit my comment as such, thanks for pointing it out

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#148

Post by nonameiguess »

rglover wrote: post #111

This is why Bitcoin is ideal. You can hold and transfer any amount, any time of day, without fear of surprises like this. Would I use it as a primary cash account for my business today? No, because of the obvious exchange rate/price swings. But long-term, moving toward Bitcoin as a settlement layer (i.e., a modern SWIFT) would solve a ton of problems and avoid situations like this. The more people that do that/normal…

This doesn't make any sense. The problems a business faces are:

- Receive money from customers. If the customers don't have Bitcoin, they're not going to pay you in Bitcoin.

- Pay your employees and suppliers. Very few of them will accept Bitcoin.

- Borrow money to cover differences between revenue and expenses. The entity loaning you the money may or may loan you Bitcoin, but what difference does it make? They're going to give you the same scrutiny and terms as any other lender in any currency.

- Security for your enormous wads of liquid assets. Banks have vaults and FDIC insurance. Bitcoin has nothing on its own, and if you use an exchange, they can do exactly what a bank does and freeze your funds, or in many cases, just steal it and spend it themselves.

You say later you just mean "well, you can withdraw some of your country's legal tender from the bank and store it as Bitcoin in case you need it later." You can just diversify the same way everyone else suggests by using multiple banks. If you trust zero banks, you can withdraw cash and stuff it under your mattress. You can loan it to a local drug lord. You can buy gold. You can buy forex and put it in a foreign bank. I guess some of these options are less liquid than others, but what advantage are you really claiming keeping your rainy day fund as Bitcoin has over anything else? Generally speaking, businesses tend to stick with things like commercial paper and treasuries and that has seemingly worked out fine.

I wish we had real verifiable base rates on the probability that a business will go under because it's cash and near cash equivalents line item was seized by authorities even though they legitimately did nothing wrong versus a business will go under because it decided to keep all of its funds in cryptocurrency and it either tanked overnight, they lost the key, SBF took their money because he felt like it, or whatever other reasons might happen.

Would you seriously bet the former is more likely than the latter?

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#149

Post by apocadam »

pjmorris wrote: post #100
CliffStoll wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks D'moy! I'm still having fun with Klein bottles and other topological manifolds. Toying with immersions of the projective plane and several knot embeddings. At the moment, retirement mainly means "start taking out required minimum distributions". All the same, I wonder: How do you retire from a marginally profitable nano-business built upon glass mathematical shapes? How'd I ever reach 74 years old?

The Acme Klein bottle and its packaging materials are among my prize possessions. And 'The Cuckoo's Egg' was a great read. Thank you for being you.

Aside from those I also loved the photos I got with the bottle and him in his garden. Thanks Cliff (:

Re: Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business

#150

Post by meowster »

leotravis10 wrote: post #28
londons_explore wrote: post #4

Diversifying in many cases won't help you. If a bank suspects fraud, they can tell other banks about their suspicion, which will cause all banks to freeze your accounts and none will be able to tell you why.

Especially if/when a person or business goes into the ChexSystems "blacklist" [1] where that individual or business can't have a bank account in the US, Canada, and EU for five to seven years. [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/blocked-by-chexsy...

I wonder if anyone has successfully sued a credit-reporting business for libel.
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