Chase Bank Arrests Man For… Cashing Chase Check
Jul 8th, 2011 | 11 responses
Talk about a dream lawsuit and an idiotic reaction from the bank.
The story is that 28 year old Ikenna Njoku received a first time homebuyer tax credit and asked the IRS to deposit the refund in his Chase bank account. The IRS sent the $ 9,000 to Chase but Njoku’s account was overdrawn, so Chase deducted the amount he owed and sent him a check for $ 8,400.
He took the check to Chase to cash but the teller was suspicious and questioned the validity of the check. In fact it took so long that Njoku left to run errands and by the time he returned the bank was closed. When he went back the next day the bank manager proclaimed the check a forgery and police arrived to arrest him.
He spent the next four days in jail (to be fair Chase called the police within a day to report it was a mistake so part of the blame there rests with the city).
During the time he was in jail his car was towed and because it took Chase more than a month to return the money he did not have the funds to get it out of impound. The car was sold and as a result he lost his job.
He’s now using his mothers car and has part time work.
Although it has been more than a year since the incident Chase has not apologized nor have they offered to compensate him for his losses.
It doesn’t help Chase’s bottom line that Njoku is black, an immigrant from Nigeria.
Trying to give Chase every benefit of the doubt I could see where the teller was initially suspicous. The whole “Nigerian Prince” scam on the Internet has raised issues with bank/check fraud and so I could see where she would want to check things out.
But certainly they should have been able to verify that the check was legitimate, after all it was a CHASE CHECK.
And certainly they should have made efforts to apologize and compensate him by now. Setting aside the debate over how much blame they have for the total time he spent in jail, they started the whole mess in the first place.
Indeed had they been smart enough to apologize and compensate him they might even have been able to mitigate the bad press by being the ‘big corporation who admits it’s mistakes’.
Instead they are likely to end up paying him a bundle and losing more customers.
11 Responses to “Chase Bank Arrests Man For… Cashing Chase Check”
You are so right and these bankster are so arrogant. I hope the guy gets a good lawyer if he doesn’t have one already and takes them to the cleaners with as much publicity as possible.
Yes indeedy, the bank needs to experience the same degree of pain they inflicted on their (ex) customer.
A few questions:
If Chase had closed with checking account due to bad checks, then why did he go back to Chase. Why not go to different bank and open an account?
Why would anyone walk away from the check, their drivers license, and a credit card to run an errand. Shot of taking your mother to the emergency room there is no errand that you mean that a person walks away from their drivers license.
The police also needed to go a better job.
honestly I think this falls on the DA. As long as Chase was totaly truthful and correct in whatever they told the police it would be hard to hold them legaly responsible.
Except they were not correct, the check was perfectly valid.
It should take under 1 minute to check the validity of a check, especially their own. There are software services available for such things… have the answer in under 5 seconds.
This whole thing stinks of incompetence by a number of people.
There is no way for Chase, a legal entity that cannot be jailed or made homeless, to experience the same degree of pain they inflicted on their customer…
The closest you could get would be throwing all the company’s officers in jail for at least six month and taking away all their assets for at least two years…
“throwing all the company’s officers in jail for at least six month ”
Fascinating. You want to take every single officer of the company, regardless of their position, responsibilities, or specific knowledge of the policies that caused this problem, and throw them in jail just because they are officers of a company that did something wrong?
I gotta say, DQ, you are doing a great job of ensuring you will never, ever have to perform jury duty.
Logan,
You tell me what penalty would convince Chase not to ever do that again…
A couple of million dollar fine is basically a rounding error for Chase, anything under a couple of hundred millions will not even be noticed, just the cost of doing business…
DQ, The basic problem I have is that you seem eager to punish people who might be innocent of any individual wrongdoing in an effort to raise deterrence towards others. I knew that you dehumanized anyone who worked for a corporation, but I did not know it was quite so advanced as to advocate short-circuiting the most foundational principles of any legitimate criminal justice system by skipping over individualized determinations of wrong-doing and proceeding straight to punishment of entire groups.
I am beginning to think my comparison of your belief system to Pol Pot’s might have been less facetious than real.
The real answer to your question can be seen in what is already happening. If you were right and nothing could convince Chase to change, why would they be trying like crazy to fix their reputation and pay off the aggrieved customer? The truth is that Chase management does care what its stockholders and potential customers think and they seek to “protect the brand”. Contrary to the fundamental notions of your apparent belief system, not everything requires the draconian interventions of an authoritarian government.
Cleanup on Aisle 6 please.