Double Check Your Cashback Credit: Chase Mistake
I spent the last weekend at Ocean City, MD with a few friends and one of them told me a story about how they experienced problems with their Chase Freedom card. If you don’t know about the card, it offers a unique cashback program that changes its categories to match your top three spending categories (plus a $50 bonus after your first purchase). Each billing period, it looks at your top three categories and gives you 3% cashback on it. Reader Joe also told me that if you have a Chase checking account then you get 2% back on the top five categories. Finally, if you let your cashback bonus accrue to $200, then they’ll kick in an extra $50. It’s “one of [his] favorite cards.”
But, my friend this weekend told me that one day he was checking out his statement and noticed that he was not getting credited with any bonus cashback. He was getting the standard 1% on everything, but he wasn’t getting 3% on his top three categories. After a brief phone call, he was told that there was a problem with his account but that he would be getting the credit retroactively applied.
Always double check that you’re getting what you’re supposed to.
Credit cards, banks, cable companies, cell phone companies, etc. are always changing their promotions and there’s no way to confirm they coded your account correctly. There was the whole headache surrounding Verizon’s free LCD TV promotion, there are always hiccups around hot promotional offers from credit cards (Chase Freedom once had a $250 first purchase promotion!), and so it’s no surprise that companies get their paperwork mixed up and fail to credit consumers when they’re supposed to.
Unfortunately, you can’t trust a company, with all its people and its mainframes, to keep those sorts of things straight. They’re not trying to be deceptive, they just can’t keep millions of accounts straight and that’s somewhat understandable. Ultimately, it’s your money and your responsibility, so be sure to double check what a company is supposed to do.
(Photo: neoliminal)
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Tags: 5% Cashback, Chase Freedom
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There are 4 comments, add your thoughts now!
I have this card as well. So far everything seems to be working OK. I am about $3 away from the $200 to collect my $250. I hope I actually receive what I am expecting.
Thank you for the article!
I’ve received the cash back check for $250 once already and just reached another $200 in rewards and so plan on getting another refund in the next couple of weeks.
One question I had though, was how do you know if Chase is selecting the top 3 categories and if they are giving you 3% back on them? Do you calculate, by hand, your % rewards for each statement?
Hey Nick,
I have one of these cards too and the bonus points are broken out onto a separate line in the rewards summary on the statement.
There’s a line for “rewards earned on purchases” and another for “bonus earnings on x, y, z”, where x, y, and z are your reward categories. Presumably if your bonus line was $0, you would know there was an error.
Great article Jim. I just checked my statements to make sure that I was receiving the 3% on my top three categories. Most companies including credit card companies will try at all costs to try not giving away freebies. This just shows that it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on your statements.
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