MM
MM's address

October 5, 2011

RE: Chase Continental MasterCard #5466 XXXXXXXXXX -
Canceled authorizations? for multiple HomeDepot.com $10 purchases on 9/9/11

Chase Credit Cards
P.O. Box 15298
Willmington, DE 19850-5298


To whom it may concern,

I have been referred by a very helpful Customer Service Senior Specialist named Jim Odell after having spoken with him on October 5, and with his colleague Carol Wrinkle on September 27.

I had used my card, on September 9, 2011 to make several transactions online with HomeDepot.com for $10 gift cards. You can see that some of my now closed card’s final activity shows 10 such transactions having gone through fine.

I then used this credit card to purchase over 200 more of these individually and on the same morning. The reason I did this was because United Airlines had been having a promotion whereas if someone buys items through the airline’s MileagePlus shopping mall for $10 or more, one receives the miles on whatever credit card is purchasing, but also one receives so many miles per purchase on the mall. In the case of HomeDepot.com, it was 2.5 miles per $1 spent, or 25 miles for every $10 gift card I bought. Like many people out there, I purchased many cards and the main reason for all of these being done individually was because United’s promotion was giving 1,000 miles for every three transactions completed. 200/3 = 66,000 miles just for letting my wife finally get to me to finish the basement!

Sadly, Chase (or HomeDepot or both) cancelled all of these transactions. Only my first 10 went through. When I found out, I quickly switched to a different credit card (Amex) and bought about 200 more HomeDepot.com gift cards using that card. I received those cards by mail have been using them to start work on my basement project in my home (To be perfectly frank, one reason I ended up cancelling my MasterCard was because it could not handle this type of purchasing whereas my Amex can—I still do have a Chase AARP card and moved the credit line over to that Visa).

The reason I am writing you is because United’s MileagePlus mall has in fact posted all of the “negative” or “minus” transactions of all these cancelled purchases, but no “plus” ones. So my account has a lot of this showing up where as what’s in the “( )” means deduction:

9/9/2011 9/30/2011 Homedepot.com ($10.00) (25) CONFIRMED
9/9/2011 9/30/2011 Homedepot.com ($10.00) (25) CONFIRMED
9/9/2011 9/30/2011 Homedepot.com ($10.00) (25) CONFIRMED
9/9/2011 9/30/2011 Homedepot.com ($10.00) (25) CONFIRMED
9/9/2011 9/30/2011 Homedepot.com ($10.00) (25) CONFIRMED
Etc…

The way these airline malls usually work is that if someone does buy and then return an item or its purchase gets cancelled, it may either show up as a plus and then a minus, or just not show up at all. But never have I seen something just show the minus! So what I need is to further prod the personnel at United’s mall along with ‘evidence’ of my transactions actually being cancelled as they attempted to process at the purchasing credit card level. If cancelled, they shouldn’t be worth anything but 0, as in ‘no earnings due to cancellation, but certainly not as a minus.
United’s MileagePlus mall personnel and/or their affiliates have been hard folk to get a hold of and no one seems to be doing much to try to help me or anyone else in this situation. As a member of a travel forum online, I can tell you there are at least 50 people I know of alone.

Chase may have reference to all of these authorizations/cancellations showing up for all of these transactions in my recently closed account. Ms. Wrinkle had told me on 9/27 that she could see all of the authorizations showing for $1 about to drop off the record.

My thinking here is that perhaps I can get a copy –a list or screen grab of every one of these printed out. And if not that, maybe a letter stating something to the effect of, “MM’s account had XXX transactions and all were canceled, etc.” This letter—on Chase letterhead, would bear some weight in my ‘case’ to try and recoup my messed up United miles.

I have all the emails for both purchase and cancellation in my Yahoo inbox, but it may take me a long time to sort through every one to get this figured out. I have about 34 pages of Yahoo emails to sift through to try to figure out what goes with what. My PDF of the MileagePlus mall shows 203 “(minused)” purchases like the examples I’ve pasted in above… that is, if their accounting isn’t missing anything and my count is right.

So I need something to help show what exactly was ‘sent over’ to United’s mall from my purchasing credit card. It’s not the fault of this Chase card that the mall is not right, but the problem had to do with cancelled transactions that happened in part due to this card or the merchant. I have yet to write to HomeDepot.com but I will do that—and will hopefully gain more from United’s MileagePlus mall as you hopefully send me what you can, as Ms. Wrinkle and Mr. Odell were unable to produce records for me.


Thank you,


MM