April 2023 by Kevin W.
It feels weird to post a Yelp review on a Chase branch, but let's just call this a PSA (at my misfortune). If you are a Chase customer, especially if you have a safe deposit box at the Chase branch located on Lake & Colorado in Pasadena, BEWARE! I'm here to share my own story, hoping to (1) raise awareness in the community, and (2) seek professional advice and possibly explore legal options. Even if this doesn't apply to you, I promise that reading about my encounter will at least be entertaining (sadly, in an unfortunate way)! (TL;DR- If you have a safe deposit box at Chase on Lake & Colorado in Pasadena with valuables stored inside, make an appointment ASAP and go check. Make sure nothing is missing!) I am still in disbelief that something like this could ever happen in modern-day banking, but it did and this took place very recently. I have been a Chase customer for nearly 20 years, and I have opened a safe deposit box at this Chase branch in early 2018. When my wife and I got married later that same year, quite a few pieces of precious metals, jewelries, and family heirlooms were gifted or passed down to us from families and friends. I, just like most people, wanted to store those valuables in a secure place, and I had decided to put everything in the safest place that I could think of- in my safe deposit box, inside the vault of a bank, at this Chase branch. Since then, I haven't needed to access my box until a couple of months ago. I made an appointment with a Chase rep, brought my ID for verification along with the original keys to my safe deposit box that were issued to me by Chase. And in case you haven't accessed a safe deposit box before, it's just like what you have seen in movies: once the bank rep verified my account info and ID, I walked into the bank vault with the rep, we located my box, inserted my key and the branch key, and turned both keys at the same time to open the door to my box. Everything up to this point was totally normal...until the rep reached inside and asked, "where's the box?" I first thought she was joking but quickly realized there's actually nothing inside. I am not referring to the content of the box being empty; I am saying that the entire physical box (along with all of its content) is missing!! It was just an empty space behind the locked door, again, just like in movies but happening to me in real life. The rep escalated this issue within the branch, and every Chase manager/Assistant VP/VP that I spoke with at the branch that afternoon kept repeatedly assuring me that there are ONLY TWO possible ways to access a safe deposit box: (1) to use the branch key along with my key to unlock the door, or (2) when legally necessary, to drill through both locks on the door. However, in my case, there is clearly a third possibility. For one, I am absolutely certain that my box along with its content were securely locked away during my last visit. Secondly, the two locks on the door were not drilled, and both keys inserted and worked perfectly fine. So this leaves me begging the questions--what happened?? How could this even happen at a place that, for most consumers like me, is presumably one of the safest places to store valuables? If my safe deposit box was somehow 'misplaced', who and how many people could have accessed the content without my knowledge? And lastly, if my safe deposit box can go missing, can other safe deposit boxes in that vault go missing the same way? A couple of months later, after many follow-up calls with the branch and their corporate office, an email to Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon, and filing complaints with CFPB, OCC, DFPI, and Pasadena PD, Chase said that they have "looked into this", and that there's no records of anyone else accessing my safe deposit box other than their "standard audits" and "maintenances". A couple of months went by, to this day, Chase never found the box or any of its content, and they never even acknowledged that a safe deposit box went m
