Ex-employee of chime here, joined early on (think first 10 employees) and spent half a decade working there.

I can guess as to what is going on here.

I am not sure if my NDA still covers me talking about stuff there, but most likely is what has happened was folks either: not using their accounts (this will trigger eventual closer) or legitimately engaging in practices that would be... improper in any banking system. It's important to note that Chime is not a bank either. These closing actually most likely happened BECAUSE of Bancorp, and not because Bancorp wasn't policing Chime properly. There is a lot of CSR practices that occur there that aren't great and that is mostly due to the fact they refuse(d?) to spend the money to scale up the actual human teams as well as finding folks who also didn't want to rip chime off themselves from the CSR department (I know of one such case that I can't get into).

They are having serious growing pains which imo still is of course no excuse for not caring for the customers, but I have seen a lot of these cases and I have seen a lot of what people have been doing then run to the media to complain about, Chime doesn't just willy nilly close accounts without a serious reason. A lot of the times the customers are mad they couldn't pull a fast one on the risk team... Anyway, I am not really here to defend them. If you have any other questions I could probably answer them.

That said, I chalk this up to their massive size (well over 12,000,000 customers) and a large portion of refusing to scale up Human Resources and instead trying to use to tech to deal with a lot of this. A few complaints like this aren't all that weird, bigger banks have way more complaints and do way worse things.

Edit: I really can't talk about what I know would cause these things to happen, as, it would tip of fraudsters or people who legit have the feds after them. But the tools we used to figure this stuff out were pretty advanced.

Edit 2: In my tenure, I saw lots of systematic fraud and also saw lots of those exact people take to social media to complain about it. That is anecdotal of course. But I saw a lot of shit that would blow your minds. I also saw many individuals engaging in fraud that they may not have even realized was fraud. One such example was the everyday Jane/John trying to deposit the same check multiple times when they knew full and well it was deposited first. Not to mention the number of dick picks people sent in via check deposit. Thanks to patents from other banks I was not allowed to deploy the ML platform I built for the mobile app to capture ONLY the check and its information, as opposed to human parts that shouldn't be in the picture.

Edit 3: Again, I am not defending them, but if you are not in Finance then honestly you're out of your depth understanding what is going on here. No offense.

Edit 4: This also reminds me of the time Bancorp went down for like 3 days and everyone took to twitter to say that China hacked Chime which was both funny, sad, and scary. Of course that isn't what happened, Bancorp is just fucking shitty.