A few days ago, I got a call from my girlfriend, Olivia. I was so deep in working on my startup, Parse.ly, that I hadn’t checked my bank account statements in several weeks. We just went into private beta last Thursday, after DreamIt Demo Day. She noticed some suspicious charges, and so I looked into them. Indeed, it looked like I had been a victim of fraud: there were three charges that clearly was not me.
I immediately called Chase Customer Service. In order to confirm the details about my account, the representative needed me to identify the fraudulent charges, but also identify charges that were actually valid. For this latter bit, I needed to identify the time/place of a specific transaction. This card was mostly used for online auto bill payments, so this turned out to be impossible for any of my last 20 valid payments. Yet the customer service rep insisted that I name a time and place. I told her, “The time and place was whenever the server for this system decided to automatically bill my account. I don’t know where their server is, I don’t know what time their cron jobs run.”
“Cron jobs?” she said.
Right, I had been hanging around techies at DreamIt Ventures for too long. “Listen, the transaction didn’t take place physically, it took place digitally. I can identify one transaction, which is about a month old, where I actually used the card in-person to buy something.” She finally understood and let me move on.
Burak from Trendsta said he felt bad for me, for how patient I had to be with this person. But that was the least of it. This little technical misunderstanding was nothing compared to what followed.