This site is about having enough potential clients are able to sue Chase at some point in the future, whenever a class action lawsuit comes up - and heck, they even will have a customer list and a relationship with you from sending this "free" letter for you in the past.
Usually in those kinds of cases, the end recipient gets very little - perhaps some subscription to a ID protection service or a few bucks but the firm who runs the class action makes a lot.
On the one hand, maybe it helps keep them honest (they cite Wells Fargo) so its good to be able to. But clearly there is some vested interest here on the part of Radvocate.
We're excited to partner on this project partly because it is very "on brand" for us from that perspective — we can help people, get our name out there, and shine light on an issue that matters to us. We're a business, but we're also all in this business (instead of some other business) because we want to make the system fairer for consumers.
ETA: Also, to correct one misapprehension: we are not in the class action business. We actually help consumers pursue individual arbitrations. We think more people should know that even if their contract doesn't let them sue, they actually do have a way to assert their power through arbitration. If anything, we'll have more customers for our current business if no one opts out of their Chase clause.
Very clever marketing, good on you for managing this, and I hope you see a great return for your efforts.
And an interesting business concept - to help consumers pursue individual arbitrations. That could be really cool especially against large corporations when they are abusive. What do you charge as people go through their individual arbitration process/ how does the profit model work?
I really have mixed feelings about the legal system - on
Also, Radvocate, wondering if you can address the PII concerns other's have raised, as that is a very big deal.
I know many here consider this to be ideological heresy but it's possible to have a transaction where both parties come out ahead and this seems like one of those win-wins to me. They do a little work for you in exchange for putting your name on a list of people they can use in a class action, you might even get $5 or something out of it if they win.
Putting your PII into a random website should be what raises red flags here. I hope they're not storing the account numbers, or at least not storing them with the associated personal details.
This suggests to me you feel that class action judgments do not adequately compensate claimants. This shouldn't dissuade us from fighting back against businesses who treat their customers unfairly.
The problem isn't the class action lawsuit or Radvocate. It goes much deeper. It's goes to the core of businesses (e.g, banks) who provide critical access to the financial system forcing you, the consumer, to resolve disputes through their shadow justice system in which they pay the arbiters, which have a history of siding more frequently with the corporation.
I don't have direct access to the fulfillment of this particular initiative, but in general we can take advantage of the efficiency of sending multiple legal notices in the same packet. So the cost per individual letter can be much less than one would assume.
...that sounds good to me! I certainly don't have the resources to take Chase to court myself, and who knows, maybe the existence of this class-action-in-waiting will keep Chase from being as shady.
"We’re a group of like-minded companies who like building things that help people. "
They're just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts!!!
On top of that, it's further identifying them as both Chase CC holders and receptive to scams, qualifying them as leads for further phishing/scamming.
But you don't just let them download it. You make them give you their email address first.
Edit: Haha! No wait, you have to click through two levels of "Don't want to give us your info? Click here to get the letter". The first one asks for you email, only after the second do you actually get the letter. Why? They already said "dont want to...". Just give it to them!
Edit2: Also the form letter, prepopulated with the Chase customer service P.O. box address, is another scam pitfall. Anyone using this kind of form letter should always check the address with the financial institution before sending any forms, especially that include PII/financial information.
People who order stamps online?
If the problem is writing the letter or stamps, then why not just send the user a postage-paid envelope, pre-addressed to Chase, with a generic letter that she can fill in with her personal information and deposit into the mail?
You should now be wondering how this "service" can be "free". As someone else has figured out, this is a company that wants lists of Chase customers to which they can market their consumer arbitration-related services.
This is interesting since the whole point of opting out here is that consumers want to avoid arbitration and reserve their rights to sue.
Other websites are offering a more sensible solution for those who cannot be bothered to write a letter: templates for a simple letter a customer can just print out, fill in her information, sign and mail.
It seems to me that it's pretty flimsy? In particular:
> To conduct research and to improve and promote our services . We use the information wecollect to conduct research and to improve or enhance and promote our Services.
Both promotion and research are pretty damn broad terms, right?
They literally ask for their customers to pick up the phone from unknown numbers and give your bank details.
Idk but I only have Chase through Amazon. Chase might get effed, but my Amazon account will probably always be fine.
"Can I (the customer) reject this agreement to arbitrate?
Yes. You have the right to reject this agreement to arbitrate if you notify us no later than 8/9/2019. You must do so in writing by stating that you reject this agreement to arbitrate and include your name, account number, address and personal signature. Your notice must be mailed to us at P.O. Box 15298, Wilmington, DE 19850-5298. Rejection notices sent to any other address, or sent by electronic mail or communicated orally, will not be accepted or effective." (emphasis mine)
How does this service handle the "personal signature" requirement?
Original comment below:
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I'm likewise not an attorney, but how hard would it be to do a simple "Type your name here to represent your signature" type of deal? This is the most common lay practice I've seen, with the more common CYA practice for electronic records being e.g. what Docusign or Adobe offer, or the use of cryptographic signatures.
I told them that I am rejecting the agreement to arbitrate. I also said that since their message portal feels official, this would be what I would use as proof of my opt out in court, if the need arises. I saved some screenshots as well.
They have updated me once already to say that they are still working on a response.
AFAIK in the Netherlands oral statements, when overheard by a witness, have the same legal standing as a signed contract.
OK, seriously, they don't technically get to decide what makes a binding agreement, a judge does that. But US law and US judges are very business-friendly. I mean there's the whole invented crime of "identity theft", whereby a bank who is defrauded by an individual gets to pass off their victimhood to a completely uninvolved third party.
Essentially, under the common law here, all that a contract needs in order to be valid is three things: a valid offer, a valid acceptance, and valid "consideration," where consideration is a legal term of art referring to 'something of value' gained through the agreement.
The idea is that, there is no servitude. Companies can offer whatever terms they want (subject to a very few number of restrictions, dependent on the industry/regulatory domain). You are under no pressure to accept. You can easily reject the terms by simply not using the product. Courts have generally been reluctant to prevent parties from agreeing to whatever lawful thing they want to agree to. The main exception is that you cannot have contracts which serve 'an illegal end.'
In the US, there's no need for a contract to be written or overheard at all. There need be no written document, no witnesses, no record whatsoever. So long as there is a valid offer (obvious jokes are not held to be valid offers, for instance), valid acceptance (you generally need to affirmatively signal acceptance, but this need not be oral or even explicit), and valid consideration (really nothing more than a formality nowadays, this is why many deeds say "exchanged for consideration of $1"), the contract is valid, even if it only exists in the minds of the two parties.
Obviously, proving such a contract can be difficult, but it can be done, particularly if the parties were acting in accordance with the terms of the claimed contract. If we orally agree that you will start working on building a shed for me, you buy supplies and deliver them to the site, but then stop work, you can't claim the contract never existed, because you've acted in accordance with that oral contract.
In this area specifically, there's been some progress made in getting the courts to understand the enormous power differential at play here. You nearly can't survive in this country without at least one credit card, and if all the major companies' cards have terms like this, then you don't really actually have a choice in the matter. It's been a slow process however.
Also, are baseless allegations OK here?
Astroturfing is big business and can be very profitable. An account itself isn't worth much, it's the overall execution that matters.
That being said, I have read through the email from Chase, and there is nothing that explicitly states that they will close it as a result of the user opting out of arbitration.
Does anyone have experience with similar situations with Chase or other banks and agreement opt-outs that they could share?
I would actually like to see that service. A website that closes your bank account for you. They can be very tricky when you try to do that.
This is disgraceful behavior from a bank and they also made clear that they tend to close accounts for arbitrary reasons.
Generally, opt-out is added to reduce the risk that courts will throw out the arbitration clause as unconscionable (unfair). Companies know that most people won't opt out, and any class action brought by somebody who opts out will only apply to other customers who opted out- cutting damages by 99%+.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_arbitration#Unconscio...
Might as well leave a box for the SSN while you're at it
We also give customers a way to just download the form without giving us the info but then of course we can't mail it for them ... we were just trying to make this easier for customers to opt out with the shitty options we were given
If you actually care about privacy and claim to not be using or selling our information for anything, why don't you make it easier to avoid giving information entirely?
Having said that, thank you for creating this. I had left Chase's email about the terms change in my inbox, starred, so I'd remember to take care of this, but not having to formulate my own letter makes things so much easier.
Good on you guys for making the thing and showing some effort, wasn't aware of their opt-out policy.
Maker of the site here! Our servers don't touch any of this data, it goes straight to Very Good Security and lives in a PCI compliant vault ... We ourselves are building a new kind of bank so we take security very seriously and are not phishing.
Happy to talk through in more details but the FAQs do a pretty good job of that too!
Does Lob hold any PCI level certifications? It appears they hold HIPAA but I see no mention of PCI?
Does Lob provide any interface that shows sent mail and the content (it appears they do)? If so and they don't hold any PCI certifications what benefit do we really have with ever getting a VGS token?
What stops you from scraping this data from Lob's API?
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Original comment below.
I'm confused on how this data lands at Lob with an account number if you never get it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the letter you send includes the account number and not the VGS token?
All of my following questions assumes an affirmative answer.
How is the account number landed in Lob? It appears something must be calling the Lob API with an unencrypted account number? What is making that call?
Does Lob hold any PCI level certifications? It appears they hold HIPAA but I see no mention of PCI?
Does Lob provide any interface that shows sent mail and the content? If so and they don't hold any PCI certifications what benefit do we really have with ever getting a VGS token?
Unfortunately Chase forces customers to mail a letter with this information on it so there's not much we can do
I told them that I am rejecting the agreement to arbitrate. I also said that since their message portal feels official, this would be what I would use as proof of my opt out in court, if the need arises. I saved some screenshots as well.
They have updated me once already to say that they are still working on a response.
In another comment you talked about starting another kind of bank? details?
Open-source a script I can run locally to generate PDFs with the information your form uses.
I've been party to some interesting convos about whether it would be legal for them to do so.
I'd love for us to have that problem.
It's legal because of a staggeringly overbroad reading of the Federal Arbitration Act that the Supreme Court has said is fine and Congress has refused to reign in.
> I really hope we can take the concept to court and murder it completely.
Many will enter, zero will win. Virtually every attempt at limiting the Federal Arbitration Act's scope in legal proceedings has been turned down by the Supreme Court.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc...
* https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/american-express...
https://www.chaseoptout.com/PrivacyPolicy.pdf - let me know if you mean something else?
From Chase's perspective, wouldn't they be asking for more details especially if their business hinges on retaining people into their business as much as they can?
Update: Additional wording
Corporations do have a stake in contractual and legal systems continuing to function, as well as in not calling down negative news coverage on themselves.
Are you just going to discard all the data afterwards or is it just a ploy to build a mailing list for your bank?
We track news about arbitration pretty closely, and I've been surprised and impressed by how much this Chase issue has "broken through." I no joke overheard a random convo about it on BART on Sunday.
The arbiter is permitted the following: * To make an arbitrary judgement outside the scope of the agreement. * The arbiter is not required to follow any law but the arbitration act. They are permitted a manifest disregard for the law. * The arbiter is not required to be fair or impartial. They aren't a judge. * The arbiter may be blacklisted by companies if they rule against the corporation. The companies know who rules against them. * The arbitrations are secret. You may research how the arbiter acted in the past. The company knows, though. You just don't.
To engage in a corporate controlled mandatory binding arbitration is to leave the rule of law and enter into a dystopia where even the courts of law are privatized. Consumer protection laws? Gone. State consumer laws? Gone.
What has counsel advised about any risk of federal authorities investigating you as possible CC phishing operation (perhaps initiated by monitoring for bank-phishing-like domain name)? (Obviously you have some defense, but the best case might cost you money and misery.)
Also, do you expect to keep the domain name past an ICANN dispute?
"JPMorgan agreed to pay $110 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its procedures for charging customers overdraft fees. It was among more than a dozen big banks sued by their customers for reordering debits from their accounts to maximize the possibility that the accounts would become overdrawn, which would generate more fees."
That's a really shady move and I'll take note to avoid any business with Chase in the future.
What would be really cool is to see this extended to many types of opt-out-by-email things — I know it's a pretty widely-used dark pattern by e.g. newspapers and spam mail companies.
Mailing address: Chase Customer Service P.O. Box 15298 Wilmington, DE 19850-5298
P.S. The website gave the info. Don't sue me :-)
This seems to be, at least in part, advertising for your bank. I clicked on it, but could get no real information about it. Would be curious for more info about it, as I'm generally tired of dealing with bad online presence.
TL; DR arbitration is not the corporate-controller enigma many seem to think it is. You trade off real benefits by opting out of Chase's mutual binding arbitration terms.
Most people should opt out, but not everyone. (Nobody should opt out unthinkingly.)
Snail Mail As A Service
A quick read of privacy policy should dissuade anyone form putting information into this system.
A+ for guerilla marketing
F- for anything related to privacy, etc...
