Suits accuse Chase of failing to protect elderly
Senior citizens recently have been warned of the financial swindle known as “pig-butchering,” in which they’re induced to invest in ventures like cryptocurrency — supposedly for huge profits — or make payments to avoid financial harm before the scammer makes off with their money.
Now a bank is being accused in two California lawsuits of failing to protect elderly women who were duped into transferring large sums into their accounts, then delivered the funds to their supposed benefactor and wound up losing their life savings.
J.P. Morgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, “has known for some time about these schemes and how its agents assist in perpetrating them,” and has a duty to protect its customers, lawyers for the women wrote in the suits, filed Monday in Los Angeles and San Mateo counties.
“Chase has a long history of failing to protect its elderly customers in the face of obvious fraud,” said Anne Marie Murphy, a lawyer for the two women. The suits said their losses totaled more than $2.2 million.
The suits seek compensation from Chase for the women’s financial losses even though the bank is not alleged to have profited from them. Murphy said the swindlers in both cases have disappeared and are unlikely to be found, and that California law allows “those who assist in an elder scam” to be held responsible for the harm.
Peter Kelley, a Chase spokesperson, said Tuesday that the San Francisco-based bank is diligent in protecting its customers.
“When customers visit our branches to complete wire transactions, our bankers ask questions, raise awareness around various scam scenarios and provide clear warnings that once a wire is sent, you may not be able to recover your money,” Kelley said. “Scammers impersonate companies, banks, government agencies and even family members to try to trick consumers out of their hard-earned money. We urge all consumers to ignore phone or internet requests for money or access to their computer or bank accounts.”
In one lawsuit, Alice Lin said she was a 79year-old widow in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra when she was contacted online in the summer of 2022 by a man who called himself Justin. He convinced her that he was her friend and could make huge profits for her by transferring her funds to cryptocurrency investments, with a purported investment application installed on her mobile phone.
Lin then met with a Chase employee, who, according to the suit, was required to seek authorization from the bank branch manager for the transactions but failed to do so. Over the next few weeks, the suit said, Lin transferred her life savings, more than $720,000, to the bank and then to Justin’s supposed investment fund, while the bank never contacted her or her daughter, a coholder of the account, or performed any risk assessment of the transfers.
The second suit was filed by Diane Artemis Yaffe of Redwood City, who in the summer of 2022 was a 76-year-old widow who kept small sums in her Chase account, mostly to care for her award-winning show dogs.
The suit said she was contacted by a man claiming to work for Amazon, where she had made some purchases from the account, and was told she was being charged for some computers.
When she denied buying them, the suit said, she was transferred to a purported fraud department, where a man posing as an Internal Revenue Service agent told her she could be prosecuted for moneylaundering and other crimes unless she paid him large sums.
Bank of America, where Yaffe held a larger account, refused to approve two transfers of funds, her lawyers said. But after the supposed IRS agent told her to withdraw her money from Bank of America, the suit said, she transferred it to Chase and, over the next five weeks, withdrew $1.846 million from four Bay Area bank branches and wired it overseas.
In one instance, the suit said, an employee at the bank’s Menlo Park branch took Yaffe into a private room and said he would refuse to authorize the transaction, telling her, “If you were my mother, I would not let you do this.” Yaffe then took a short drive to the bank’s San Carlos branch, which promptly approved the withdrawal, the suit said.
The purported agent told Yaffe that another IRS agent would return the funds to her home, along with a document that would clear her name, but no one ever arrived, the suit said. She has filed complaints with the FBI and local law enforcement agencies.
“Chase has a long history of failing to protect its elderly customers in the face of obvious fraud.” Anne Marie Murphy, a lawyer for the two women