We have our own issues with the CEO of JPMorgan Chase today, after we requested a list of his favorite power ballads — in light of the reading list he recently distributed to interns — and were told no because JD is such a music lover, “it would be hard to put a list of favorites together.” (This is obviously unacceptable, if the man can get his head around a collateralized-debt obligation, he can make a choice between “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Here I Go Again,” though it is an equally difficult endeavor.) But our disgruntlement pales in comparison to the anger felt by Sean Michael Carey, the Texan who started the Facebook Page Punch Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) in the Balls. We talked to Carey and found out why he’s so pissed.
It’s a familiar story.
As it happens, Carey, 33, is a former employee of Chase — he worked in loan origination for the company back in 1999 — but this doesn’t have anything to do with that, he says. Working at Chase was “great,” he said. “I loved them.” But being a customer, he has found, is a different story. Recently, Carey and his wife moved to Frisco, Texas, where they opened a second bank account in addition to the one they had at Washington Mutual, now owned by Chase. Carey began having the paychecks from his retail job auto-deposited into the new account, but a number of their automated payments, “our car payment, our car insurance, my credit card” were still coming out of the Chase account, so until they got organized — the Careys also have a new baby — and switched them, he decided to write checks to the old account from the new account to cover the payments. However: “There was a mix-up with my direct deposit,” he says. “I’d checked the wrong box when I signed up, and it was going into my savings, not into my checking.” Two of the checks bounced. “It was my fault,” Sean admitted. “So I paid the fees and all that. I moved the money over to my checking account, and I deposited a new check into the Chase account.” Chase put a hold on the new check, which Carey said he found reasonable, given the ones he’d bounced. “Then they sent me a letter saying, any overdrafts that are going to occur, we’ll reimburse you. But then they didn’t. They paid the bills, but they charged me overdraft fees on all of them.” Plus, the check seemed to be taking forever to clear, even though the money was gone from his other account. Eventually, he went into the branch and deposited the last $132 in cash, to cover the last of his bills, so he wouldn’t get an overdraft fee. It was only after that, Carey said, that he was informed the bank had actually frozen his account and was investigating him for check fraud. “I get a letter that says if it comes back that I haven’t committed fraud, they would mail me a check in ten to fifteen days.” Carey was pissed: JPMorgan had hijacked all of his cash, and he had no recourse. “I’ve spent, in the last week, about nine hours on hold with customer service,” he said. “It’s so not like that when you’re an employee. You get right through.” Frustrated, he turned to Facebook: “I wanted to punch someone. Not one of the customer-service people, it was like, I wanted Chase Manhattan personified. When I got home, I thought: The CEO, that’s who I want to punch,” he said. On the Facebook Page, there’s a picture of Dimon with the words:
“Today it’s probably more like $180,” says Carey. “They didn’t pay my credit card bill, even though my account is frozen, they can still charge me an overdraft fee on that.” Overall, though, he says the page is a joke — a way to reach out to “other people who have had this experience,” and that he doesn’t actually wish violence upon the CEO, “or his family, or anything like that … I’d settle for someone chucking a water balloon at him.”
Sean Michael Carey Would Like to Punch Jamie Dimon in the Balls [NYM]
