My credit card statement this month was different for the first time. I had a balance, but the minimum payment was zero dollars. This confused me. How can I have a balance and the minimum payment be zero? I didn’t think much of this and I thought it was a mistake. I setup my payment to pay off my balance in full like I always do. I needed to find out why my minimum payment would be set to zero. So I sent a message to customer service. Chase’s customer service is very good by the way. They always get back to you quickly and accommodate you well.
You can see in the picture above that my statement clearly says I carry a balance, and my minimum payment is zero.
My message to Chase was this, “I am a little confused why my last statement says minimum payment due is 0 dollars?” Here was the response I got from Chase…
Awesome! Thanks for the good news Chase, but this is a total scam. They want me to skip this payment so they can charge me interest. I’m posting this because as soon as I read this email, I had to let everyone know about it. If they allow you to “skip” a payment don’t do it. The minimum payment for my balance would have been about $18. If I had taken Chase up on this wonderful offer I’d be charged $12 dollars in interest. So this only benefits Chase. Maybe if you were really short on cash this could help you out, but for people like me who pay all their balances in full, this is just a scam to try and make a buck off you. I know $12 dollars doesn’t seem like much but multiply that by all the accounts Chase has.
What if you had setup automatic payments? Would this not go off because the minimum payment due is zero? If so, that would really screw people over.
If you liked this, or know anyone that should know about this, please share and let me know what you think below.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Thanks for this ! I received the same thing today I noticed
What a blatant scam
you still accrue the fincance fee that you’d normally pay!
July 16th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Contact Customer Service about this, they waived the finance charge for me. This is a really bad scam. An invitation for a class action suit.
July 16th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Hey rakeshB, luckily I contacted them before I made any payments. So I avoided this all together. It is terrible, and yes a class action suit could be filed. We could def report this.
Im hoping people DON’T take advantage of this special offer.
One thing I’ve said and I will say again. Call Chase if you have any issues. I’ve called a few times and they are so quick to make any adjustments they are really good.
Have you seen my other post about the cash back thing they did for me? http://bit.ly/Yddpx
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February 13th, 2011 at 6:53 am
My partner and i definitely need to think much more in that direction and see what i can do concerning this.