Is a Chase glitch costing you money?

I know I’m smart and all, but I find it hard to believe I’m the only one to notice this glitch and its possible impact. Of course, if other people have complained to Chase then why hasn’t it been fixed already?

Maybe I should give a little background…

I always pay my Chase credit card balance online and usually I try to schedule the payment several weeks in advance to ensure I don’t get dinged with a nasty late charge (seriously, $39 is ridiculous!).

However, recently I’ve noticed that the due date updates on the payment page as soon as my new statement is available, but the balance from the previous month remains the same.

For example, in January my balance to pay the card off in full was $1,363.70. On January 28, I logged on to schedule my February payment and one of the options I could select was to pay the full statement balance of $1,363.70, which it said was due on February 17. (Click the screenshot example on the right to enlarge the view)

At first, I marveled at the extreme coincidence of having the exact same balance two months in a row (okay, maybe I’m not as smart as assumed above…). Then I got suspicious and downloaded an electronic copy of my February statement, which showed my balance was actually $1,416.69.

Two days later the website had updated the statement balance option to the correct February total. But my question is, what if I hadn’t noticed and I’d put through a scheduled payment for the $1,363 amount? Would I have been surprised in February to see finance charges for the difference of $52.99?

While the finance charges would only have been $7 in my case, I read online that Chase has 32 million credit card customers worldwide. So, even if .01% of their customers paid online and accessed the website during that specific two-day period, that’s 3,200 people affected.

At $7 a pop (which I’m simply using as a point of reference, although it could be much more or less depending on the difference in balance from one month to the next), that’s $22,400.

I sent an email to Chase Customer Service about this on January 29, but I’ve not yet received a reply despite an auto-response email that said they would respond to my message within four hours. I guess in their defense, they didn’t specify within four hours of what so that could mean within four hours of the Academy Awards, hell freezing over or worse, their next government bailout…

Sorry I digress. So, has anyone else noticed this or worse, been charged interest on a statement balance they thought they’d paid in full?

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