Margaret Guadarrama had a trying winter holiday season.
First a hacked debit card, then a lost phone, then having to create a new Gmail account because the number that Google wanted to confirm as hers so she could access her old Gmail account was the old number that she no longer had.
“In the meantime, I got a new debit card, but some of my creditors got paid with my debit card and because I had a new one, they weren’t getting paid,” he said. she stated. “Because I had a new phone number and email, they couldn’t contact me.”
Almost all of this she was finally able to train on her own, she said. The exception was his Amazon Rewards credit card from Chase Bank.
Guadarrama emailed SOS on March 24 to say she had spent the past week trying unsuccessfully to re-establish friendly relations with the account which apparently could not confirm her identity via phone number, device or personal information.
At one point, she says, the identity verification gods asked her if she had ever lived at one of the four addresses in Cedar Park, Texas. Her ex-husband had, she said, but not her, which “wasn’t the answer they wanted.” She said Chase told her to refrain from using her card and she would call him the next day. She did, but they didn’t, she said.
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“All I want to know is how much I owe them and how much I have to pay per month,” she said. “However, it seems unimportant to them because they cannot verify that I exist.”
SOS first emailed Chase and Amazon on behalf of Guadarrama on April 11; nine days later, neither she nor SOS had replied.
So SOS harassed them again on April 21 and was rewarded less than an hour later with a response from Ashley Dodd, card communications manager for Chase Card Services, who said Guadarrama’s concern had been “transmitted” to “our executive office”.
The next day she was back to say “we have spoken directly with Ms Guadarrama and confirmed that she now has full access to her account”.
Guadarrama confirmed the same to SOS on April 26.
“The security of our customers’ accounts is a top priority and for its protection, a temporary suspension has been placed on Ms. Guadarrama’s account after we detected a potential suspicious call when she was initially unable to pass security authentication,” Dodd said.
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