Account freezes and shutdown seem to be the new theme lately. Just a few days ago I wrote about American Express freezing Membership Rewards accounts for some people who received referral or authorized user bonuses. Now there’s a new case from Chase where accounts were shutdown for having a high credit limit.
This new data point comes from Reddit. User morphogencc tried using one of his Chase credit cards and it was declined, After checking with Chase, all of his accounts were apparently shut down. This was after 3 yars of being a Chase customer. He was given these two reasons for his his account closures:
- Too many recent credit requests in the last 2 years (6 in 2016, 10 in 2017), and
- High credit limit (about 2X of annual income)
What’s strange about this move is that the customer hadn’t opened an account in over 4-5 months.
Guru’s Wrap-up
This is only one data point, but it should still make you think about taking steps to avoid a similar shutdown. There’s no sure solution here, and we do not even know for sure if there is a real problem. It looks like a drastic step to take on the part of Chase though. If limit is too high, then it could have been easily solved by lowering limits on some of the customer’s cards.
But it might be a good idea to close down down some credit cards that you don’t use and also lower limits on some of your Chase cards. The latter should be even more critical if your total credit limit with Chase is anywhere close to twice your annual income.
