BUMP

I wanted to post a warning regarding Chase Bank and what appears to be an attempt to thwart credit card bonus whoring.

They are now DECLINING applications for most (and perhaps all) credit cards if you have a certain number of new credit cards opened WITH ANY BANK in the past 24 months.

I spoke to the lending department, and was told that this was a hard rule handed down by corporate, with zero exceptions allowed.

In my case, I opened 8 credit cards between July 2015 and today.

That is considered excessive by Chase, even though most of those cards were NOT Chase cards, and my credit/payment history is virtually perfect.

I was told that I will be shut out from all new Chase cards until at least late July 2017, at which point two cards I opened in July 2015 will "fall off" the new list. However, they will not tell me the "magic number" of cards they're looking for in the past 24 months, so even with 6 cards in 24 months (instead of my current 8), that might still be too much.

This is very disappointing.

They did not state that this is about thwarting bonus whoring, but I believe it probably is. The reason is that they don't seem to care in this case regarding the amount of total credit held, or your ability to pay your existing cards. This does not seem to be a matter of preventing risk, but rather turning away customers who seem to open a whole lot of cards in a short time, which is a sure sign of bonus whores. I could be wrong, but either way I'm shut out of anything new with Chase for another 5-6 months, and perhaps longer.

In fact, if I bonus whore with any other card, again I will screw myself with Chase, as that will add to my "new cards opened within 24 months".

As Chase provides a lot of the best cards for bonus whoring, I would advise NOT opening low-value credit cards in the future, as this will screw you later when attempting to apply for Chase cards.

Annoyingly, two of those eight cards include the MGM M-Life credit card (which I only got so I could get free parking at MGM properties) and a fail HSBC card which was "sold" to me under false pretenses by an incompetent banker.