After Being Mugged In The Park, My Credit Card Company Did It Again

Most of you probably read my account of getting drugged and robbed in Istanbul.

However I haven’t reported the mugging I got from one of my credit card issuers in the aftermath.

While the drugging and robbery were over in an afternoon on July 2, the mugging by the bank occurred during the ensuing nine weeks as I tried to show that I was truly the victim of a crime and should have the fraudulent charges on my stolen credit card removed.

Just hope something like this never happens to you.

(Note: I’ve inserted some random photos of my recent three-month stay in Turkey that I haven’t shared yet, just to lighten the mood and show Turkey in a different, better light than what might be inferred from what happened to me in a single incident. Otherwise the photos are not specifically relevant to the post.)

What I lost to that dirty thief in Istanbul was a Charles Schwab Bank debit card that I used to withdraw cash from ATMs as I travel, a Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card, and my cell phone. (I ate the loss on the cell phone, a calculated risk on my part since I don’t insure my electronics.)

Schwab, as I have come to expect over seven years of doing business with them, was courteous, prompt and understanding of my needs. They reversed the fraudulent ATM charges — about $4,500 — immediately without question.

Dealing with Chase, however, was like getting mugged again, only in slow motion.

Chase, a banking division of JPMorgan, reversed the charges initially but then rebilled me for the charges a few weeks later — about $3,500 — without bothering to tell me.

I found out when I checked my accounts at the end of the month as I normally do before paying my bills. Chase was charging me for the full amount of the clothing and jewelry that the thief charged on the card that he stole while I was unconscious under a tree in a park from the drug he’d slipped into the orange juice he bought me.

Immediately I bought international minutes for phone calls to Chase in the U.S. to protest.

At issue was the initial Turkish police report that I sent to both Schwab and Chase within three days of the incident. The report was written in Turkish, which I thought might be a problem. But I spoke to a Chase representative who was very clear that it was not a problem. Chase had translators for that and I was instructed to submit the report in Turkish as soon as I could. Good news.

I would be notified soon of the decision, I was told.

But Chase decided it either couldn’t or wouldn’t translate the report after all, and had shelved its “investigation” — again, without notifying me — wasting weeks while I was waiting patiently to find out what happened. I had to contact Chase to find out.

Calling Chase would always involve long periods on hold while I was transferred here and there within the company, which was especially annoying when I was paying for international minutes to make the calls.

They were also picky about what was in the report, despite it being signed by several Turkish police officials. Unfortunately, I had to agree about the lack of substance in the report. There was no police report number, official seal or narrative sufficient to assume that there was any information in the report other than that I had submitted a non-specific complaint at the police station.

I was disappointed when I first saw that, too. But Schwab accepted it, so why not Chase? And how did Chase know for sure what it said or didn’t say if they didn’t translate it like they said they would? But never mind, they just wanted me to get a new police report.

Fun With The Tourism Police

I went back to the police, but this time to the elite Turkish Tourism Police, not the lunkhead cops in the local Balat precinct. The Tourism Police specialize in crimes against tourists. They seemed embarrassed by the shoddy work of the Balat police on behalf of a foreigner and jumped right into action.

I was immediately treated to a full investigation. I was escorted with urgency around the city by a young, hotshot plainclothes detective in a police car with a driver racing through traffic, flashing blue and red lights, stopping wherever I suggested necessary to recreate the events of the crime.

Potential witnesses were grilled on the spot as the detective would pull his ID smartly out of the back pocket of his tight black jeans to flash his badge, leaving the hem of his tight black Gucci T-shirt pulled up just far enough to catch a glimpse of the handgun bulging from his hip.

A video of my assailant was obtained from the cafe where he and I initially met, and I spent hours under interrogation myself, being asked repeatedly about details to the point where sometimes I was confused about whether I was the victim or the suspect.

Around midnight, after more than 12 hours, a low-level cop pecking away with both index fingers finally completed a typewritten report. I was asked to read it, approve it and sign it.

I had to laugh. It was all in Turkish. “How can I approve and sign a statement I can’t read?” I asked Yusuf, the “good cop,” who was leading the investigation.

I could see the faces of a half dozen police investigators drop like pants in a brothel.

Yusuf tried hard to get me to sign, saying “we” were all in this together, all just trying to do the right thing, that I needed to trust them, the report just says everything I said, and that we were all friends.

“Aren’t we friends?” he pleaded.

But now empowered, I felt playful in the fatigue of the early morning hour.

I looked Yusuf in the eye, hesitated, and said softly, “The only person in this world that I trust is my mother.”

Momentarily speechless, Yusuf backed off. Moments later he bent down to where I was seated and asked softly, “Is your mother still alive?”

I couldn’t hide a smile and we both laughed.

But I was really tired and hungry — they hadn’t fed me in all this time. I was feeling more and more like a prisoner.

A few hours earlier while waiting in the police station during a break in the investigation, I stood and announced I was going to get a bottle of water from the little store on the corner near the station and walked out.

You might have thought a mass murderer was escaping. A squad of patrol officers was quickly dispatched to escort me back. They couldn’t speak English and I just kept walking. Apparently they weren’t sure whether they were authorized to take me by force or not, so the four burly, armed, uniformed police officers escorted me into a tiny store to buy a one-liter plastic bottle of water.

I can’t imagine where the investigators thought I might go, or what I might do. They had already confiscated my passport.

Meanwhile, as the standoff over signing the report was still unresolved, I noticed the investigative team in the room ominously mumbling among themselves about something that I imagined wasn’t good for me. I didn’t want to be held in a dank cell over the weekend or longer until I signed, and visions of “Midnight Express” were coming to mind.

I had an idea. I said I’d sign only with a note saying that I hadn’t read the report because an English version was not available to me. The police officers all started turning to one another, shrugging and nodding. They were good with that, I could tell. They just wanted to go home, too.

Then, just for dramatic, humorous effect in the early morning gloom, I couldn’t resist doing my best Art Carney “Ed Norton” impersonation, pen in hand, twirling my right arm to warm up and tapping the tip of the pen to my tongue before writing my little message in block letters at the bottom of each page, then signing my name with an indecipherable flourish of cursive.

There were six copies to be signed, three pages each. I had to sign each one.

I stopped once to flex my hand and asked, looking around, “Don’t you guys use copy machines?” No one was amused. I went on signing.

Once I put ink on the final copy, the collective sigh of relief in the room was audible as the troops began to disperse. It was well after 1 a.m.

As we were finally leaving the police station, Yusuf asked if he could buy me a cup of coffee, an admirable attempt to celebrate our new bond of international friendship.

However, while esteemed travelers like Rita Golden Gelman advise never to decline such an invitation, I did.

“I just want to sleep,” I told Yusuf. He had one of his flunkies drive me back to my room in Balat.

Now Back To Chase

While helpful, the tourist police managed to drain almost every ounce of energy in me. But I still had to deal with more Chase reps.

With a signed three-page report finally in hand, I was hoping all I had to do was send it electronically to Chase’s Fraud Investigation Department, which I did.

But the day after saying goodbye to Yusuf, the telephone runaround with Chase’s formidable first line of customer service began anew. All I wanted to know was whether they had received the new police report.

In the meantime, just in case, I had my Turkish copy of the report professionally translated to English by a company in Istanbul at my expense and I sent that to Chase, because I wasn’t sure whether they have the ability to make a translation or not. I’m still not sure.

Finally, I reached a rep who said that while she couldn’t connect me to a specific supervisor, whose name I provided, she would nevertheless send a message to the proper department concerning my issue.

That night around 10 p.m. while I lay in bed, my phone rang with a call from a woman identifying herself as a supervisor in the fraud investigation department. She apologized for the misinformation about the translation and the delay and said that, indeed, Chase could and would translate the document, and that the investigation would be reopened. She promised that she would personally receive the translated report, make a decision, and call me back within a week.

That sounded good to me. She gave me her full name (first name, May) and a number for her department that I was never able to reach her with. But at the time, on the phone, she did sound contrite and sincere. I was hopeful.

A week later, I still hadn’t heard from May.

I called again to see if I could find out whether translated police report that I had sent was received.

That put me back to dealing with the customer service “team” again repeating the entire story to rep after rep who could only tell me that the case had been shelved again due to the lack of a police report in English, that Chase doesn’t translate documents, and that all they could do was advise me to wait up to 20 days for a “new investigation” once the fraud investigators receive the report.

I was about to have a seizure.

I kept insisting that I wanted to speak to May or at least to someone who would send May a message telling her that I was waiting for her call. But all the “customer service” reps I talked to either acted like they’d never heard of this supposedly ranking supervisor, or that even if they had, they wouldn’t be able to send her a message.

I admit I was pretty upset and that my foul mood was being transmitted rather too efficiently. One rep apparently “lost” my call during a transfer to an irrelevant department, causing me to call back and start again with a new rep. Then another rep just flat out cut me off mid-call while I was explaining the rationale for my tone of voice which, I was informed, was inappropriate to use with Chase reps.

They also may have been bothered by the stinging sarcasm about their “customer service” department that I began to employ for additional effect.

I went to bed that night all amped up, unable to sleep, tossing, turning, plotting my next move against the evil Chase customer service reps.

About an hour later, around 11 p.m. in Istanbul, my phone rang and, by some miracle, I heard a soft, soothing voice that sounded like May.

With no reference whatsoever to my previous encounters that day with Chase reps, she apologized for something I didn’t quite get the gist of, then said she received the translated report that I sent, had read it, and was in the process of reversing the fraudulent charges in my account.

In the confusion of my sleepless agitation, I blurted, “Is this really you, May?” But she ignored me and just said it would take 24-48 hours for the reversed charges to show online.

She then added spritely, “Thank you very much for being a customer of Chase!” End of call.

Was I dreaming?

I was fully awake at 6 a.m. and the first thing I did was check my online account, fully expecting to see nothing new and to spend the next 48 hours pulling my hair out.

But there it was! All the charges were reversed plus the interest that had accrued while the charges sat in my account, just as May promised.

It had been nine weeks since the thief left me unconscious beneath a tree in Balat Park and had his fun.

Now Chase had finally made me whole, which pleased me at last, only bitterly so.

Lessons learned?

1. Don’t count on Chase to be your translation service;
2. Persistence pays with customer service reps;
3. Righteous indignation does have its place; and,
4. Don’t drink the orange juice that your new travel friend from France buys for you in the park!