Introduction
Continuing on with Chase shutdown week, this reader was shut down earlier this week (seems like a mass audit happened lately with Chase.) Anyway, it was actually the reader’s spouse that got shut down. Initially, the reader thought it was due to sudden spend on one of their Chase cards, but ultimately, they called in and it was because like many others, “too many new accounts opened.” How many you ask? Well 16 last year (none of them were Chase.) The spouse had 2 Chase cards at the time – the longest credit card ever and a 4 year old Chase card. We think what put eyes on the account was high utilization on other cards when Chase did a soft pull.
Reinstatement
The reader’s husband then called in to Chase one more time to plead their case. It was a 20 minute phone call basically saying how great a customer he had been, no late payments, very long history, how great Chase was, and asked to have a second review of the account. After a day or two, the accounts had been miraculously reinstated.
Lessons Learned
It is possible to have your Chase accounts reinstated. I know 3 other readers who tried this and were NOT reinstated. I also know of another reader who was re-instated. I think overall your success rate of reinstatement may be less than 20% (just depends on the circumstances.) However, the best course of action is to not get into that situation in the first place is to not put eyes on your account either due to ramp up in spend, applying for a Chase card, or high utilization on ANY credit cards.
what number did you call to get reinstated?
I think people just called the number on back and kept escalating.
What does high ramp up usually mean? Would that mean I spend double or triple of what I usually spend? Or 10 times?
It means when you overspend abnormally over your average spend. Like spending $10K after averaging $1K for the past year or so.
Thanks. I understood the abnormally. Just wasn’t sure what was too abnormal.
Every bank has a different algorithm, so don’t take my example as the standard. No one really knows how much ‘abnormal’ really is.
What kind of high utilization are we talking about? 90%+ or high as in tens of thousands of dollars but not necessarily maxing the cards out or both?
I think ultimately you want to be below 25% on all your cards. That’s my rule of thumb anyway. Or pay off so it closes at $0. Seems the people who have been hit have been 50%+.
Yeah, just wondering if it was overall utilization or specific cards cause you can be 50%-100% on a card but be less than 25% overall (or really less than 10% overall depending on the credit lines).
Regularly put 70% or so on 0% APR cards but overall is always ~5-10%
I think ideally, EACH CARD, should be less than 25% because all of the shutdown stories, I bet their TOTAL UTIL prob hovered around 25%, but there would be a handful of cards at 50%+; maybe a few at 90% or so.
“called into chase”
That was helpful!
Who else are you gonna call? If you want your account back badly enough, you’ll keep escalating until you get to the right department.
I meant it would be helpful to state, as an author of an article with the sole purpose of bringing awareness on how to go about getting accounts reinstated, which department and who the person contacted and perhaps details of the conversation. I don’t think the article meant to prove this is possible, ANYTHING is possible, but perhaps not probable. So we know the What, the article, the author, should focus on the HOW. Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing your insights.
P.S. getting around 5/24 is possible, call chase.
The point of the post wasn’t “How to get reinstated by Chase” It was that a) it’s possible to be reinstated and b) don’t get to that point.