We recently reported on some people who were getting shut downs on their Chase Amazon Prime Visa card for doing huge amounts of spend. In that case, Chase didn’t fully terminate their relationship, just shut down the Amazon card.
What things can cause a full relationship shut down from Chase?
There was some discussion recently about people who try triggering large Chase Offers and then returning/cancelling the purchase. Reader Rose wrote in an insightful comment:
There are many things I do not know about in this life, but I know a lot about Chase shutdowns, so please believe me when I tell you this is the surest way to speedrun a Chase SD short of hacked links, self-swiping, or Lyft abuse (or selling points boost bookings nowadays).
There have been lots of SDs related to this, though it’s not always the only cause. In particular, Turo abuse got some people on Chase’s radar last year (while Turo abuse was not in itself sufficient for SD in most cases, it definitely got eyes), as did that offer where they gave you like $400 if you booked and cancelled a thousand-dollar full-body MRI.
Yes, you’ll probably get away with doing this every so often on one or two cards — which is to say, if you keep the reward low, the risk will (probably) be as well. But IMO this is not the bank with which you want to scale this sort of thin.
Rose identifies a few separate potential shut down causes, I’ve added a couple more:
- Doing a Chase Offer and then cancelling to pocket the credit – presumably organic use with sporadic returns/cancellations is fine, but volume abuse of offers can lead to shut down.
- Using a hacked link to sign up for a Chase card – I’m not sure how common hacked links are with Chase, here is one example.
- Self-swiping – this is a classic things banks shut people down for.
- Lyft abuse – I have no idea what this is and I intend to keep it that way. 🙂
- Selling points boost bookings has lately become a risk – I’ve heard some grumblings about this as well, likely those who do it in volume.
- Huge spend volume – we discussed earlier in the post.
- Suspicious payment activity – this is the only one we always heard about back 10-15 years ago. Having multiple banks or third party accounts/deposits used to raise flags on accounts. Not sure if this is still a big deal.
Some useful warnings here. Feel free to discuss more in the comments.
Interestingly, people have begun noticing that with some Chase Offers they’ll add in the fine print:
Abuse of offers may result in exclusion from future offers.
And so it might be that Chase is moving to penalize those who abuse Chase Offers by simply disallowing them from participating in any future Chase Offer deals.
- Related post (dated): Sparing your Credit Cards from Shut Down
