An hour of Chase Sapphire Reserve application approvals

Introduction

If you were in a work meeting yesterday or was out catching Pokemon, then you missed out on an hour of pure churning bliss.  For approximately an hour on 8/15/16 from 10:00AM to 11:00AM PST, the Chase Sapphire Reserve card had an online application link and was auto-approving people like it was 2011.  The only caveat was that the application link had no mention of the 100K bonus.  I wasn’t too worried about that since Chase is usually good with matching offers if you’re within 60 days of application.

I got word of it at around 11AM and was unsure about applying for my mom and wife.  My wife had just refinanced our house, way over 5/24, and was rejected last time due to debt/income ratio issues.  My mom is over 5/24, but not as bad as my wife.  And remember yours truly is banned from Chase.

Applications

Anyway, about 30 minutes of hearing of so many approvals with >5/24, I decided to apply for my mom since she was the lowest 5/24 number:

At this point, I figured I was playing with the house’s money and figured I’d try my wife too.

I was so shocked that both my mom and wife got approved, that I figured for shits and giggles, I’d try too.  Remember that I was banned about 6 months ago, and usually people who are banned can only get non-UR cards when they get back in, and after a couple of years, maybe you’ll be lucky to get an Ink, but I have not heard anyone get a Sapphire or Freedom after the axe.  But this was a special situation I thought, so I went ahead and applied:

The rule of thumb these days is DON’T CALL RECON with Chase and just wait it out.  However, it seems that people were being approved by recon by moving around CL, so I figured it’d be best to call in.  I called and the rep asked me for my income and rent/own payment.  She then put me on a “brief 2-4 min hold.”  About 5 minutes later, she came back and needed another “brief 2-4 min hold.”  At this point, I was expecting the worst.  However, after nearly 10 minutes, she came back on and said something along the lines of, “I’ve recommended your application to be approved, but I’ll need to forward it on to a secondary group.  You’ll hear back in 1-2 weeks.”  I was SHOCKED, but I’m also still expecting to be turned down via letter in 1-2 weeks.  Will let you guys know.

Conclusion

It seems that of the 20ish people I know who applied, less than a handful got rejected due to various reasons – too much CL, too many accounts/inq, etc.  However, the people who did get approved were way over 5/24.  It reminded me of 2011 when Chase was giving out cards like candy.

Now the question from the people who missed it is – how could you have known?  Well if you follow all the big blogs on Twitter, they mentioned it (as well as yours truly) after 30 minutes of it going live (the delay due to writing up the post.)  To get real time information, you’ll have to level up.