In late 2021, we started to get information about a stunning crisis that had taken place in Scientology. Registrars, or “regges,” the salespeople of Scientology, had developed a method for obtaining multiple credit cards for Scientologists who had little or no credit in order to ring up huge balances for future Scientology services.
We even had a document that spelled out how to fool Chase bank in particular in order to obtain large numbers of cards and credit for people who were then saddled with unwanted debt. The practice even had a name: The Chase Wave, describing how it was possible to take out one card after another before the bank caught on to what was happening. (Other banks, like Navy Federal, were also targeted.)
But by 2019, we were told, Chase had caught on and changed its policies in order to shut down the fraud. Numerous people came forward after our initial story confirming that they had witnessed the Chase Wave activities or had been victimized by it.
And now, after discussing further with our sources about how the fraud was actually carried out, we’ve put together this new description, editing together the contributions of several people who took part in it or were victimized by it…
The Chase wave is pretty simple but the way that it was used is much more involved.
It seems to have started in the Ideal Org fundraising space, where a “public” wanted to donate money but didn't have the money.
Certain fundraisers would know which credit cards had the highest credit limits, 0% promotions, or ways to get approved.
An example is that Navy Federal would approve high limits for people with military family members, or Home Depot would generally give a high credit limit with 0% interest for a year.
The fundraiser normally sat with the public and tried to get them credit, but normally it would take time, and since the Sea Org are the "Most ethical group on the planet" many public would just give them their Social Security number and have them figure out how to get them credit.
It was common for the fundraiser to do all the research on which cards are best for the person and then sign up for several cards all at once — the new card would not get reported to the credit agency until the end of the day, and so different banks would each approve the public for credit without taking into account the new credit just issued by another bank.
Chase would actually approve three different cards on the same day and someone had the idea to merge the cards to have one card with a limit three times higher than it should have been.
Another important factor is that the fundraisers would try to overestimate the annual household income in order to get more favorable credit limits — and it is quite possible they just made up numbers.
Let's say the fundraiser got the public approved for an additional $20,000 in credit. It's going to be a week or two before you get the actual card number, but you need the money in before 2pm on Thursday. That's when “Bridging” comes into play.
Bridging is when another person (normally a public but sometimes a staff member) has unused credit but does not want to donate. They will put someone else's donation on their card and get paid back when the person's card comes in.
Sometimes this was done using a balance transfer from the new card to the bridging person's card.
Other times the new card was run, and once it cleared the bridging person's card was charged back by the church.
Other times the new card was run at the church, and then a check was written from the church account directly to the bridging person.
At some point someone figured out that if you pay down all of your credit card debt, it spiked your credit score, which is where the credit refresh comes in and all of the above things come together.
Person A and Person B both want to buy their Bridge (or donate) but neither has money or available credit. They each have $10,000 in credit card debt, $0 in available credit and need $30,000 in additional credit to make their donations.
The fundraiser gets both social security numbers and agreement to get more credit for both people.
Person A has a better credit score, so he gets signed up for $30,000 in additional credit using the Chase Wave, and that amount is merged into one card. Most likely the reported household income is higher than reality.
Now Person A has $10,000 in credit card debt, and $30,000 in available credit.
The fundraiser has both social security numbers and most likely all of the bank logins, so he does a balance transfer for $10,000 from Person A's new credit card to pay all of Person B's credit card debt.
The next time Person B's credit report is run their score jumps because they just paid off all their cards, have 100% availability etc. So the fundraiser does the Chase Wave for Person B and gets them an additional $30,000 in credit.
A $10,000 balance transfer is then done from Person B's new account to Person A's new account.
No actual new money has been added to the equation, they each still have $10,000 in credit card debt, but they now have $30,000 in available credit to make their donations.
This is what was referred to as a "credit refresh."
That's all well and good, but in the above scenario the fundraiser has to wait weeks before they can run the each of the cards for $30,000 - and the money has to be invoiced this week before 2 pm!
What would generally actually happen is that there were some public or staff who would do the credit refresh and not donate — they would just have extra credit which they would use to bridge people's donations.
You would have retired staff making $7k a year with $150,000+ in available credit - which they would use to facilitate these refreshes.
At some point some of the people who used to be fundraisers were posted in the Los Angeles Org. They started doing these credit refreshes for newer public.
Once LA Org became a training ground for all of the Orgs this whole process was exported to almost every Org in the US.
You would sometimes have someone who had only been in Scientology for a few days get signed up for $25,000 in new credit with 0% interest for a year — which they agreed to because they were happy with whatever service they were doing and probably didn't really understand what was happening.
You could compare it to walking into a used car dealership and giving them your social security number and carte blanche - you're going to be impressed by the car you walk out with, but you'll be pretty unhappy when your first bill comes in the mail.
Since there were so many people now doing this, you would sometimes have one public or staff member in progress bridging five or more credit refreshes - with several people's debt on their credit cards, waiting to be balance transferred or paid back.
You would also sometimes get a public who went through the process go home and realize what they did and refuse to continue. In this case the person bridging the payment had already paid the Org, but was not going to get paid back by the public.
What would sometimes happen is that the fundraiser (or staff member) would promise to just balance transfer the money back to the person bridging once they did a credit refresh on the next person.
Is this confusing enough?
It was definitely confusing for the people doing it. They were doing all of this while being yelled at and punished whenever money wasn't coming in the door - so they didn't keep good records and lost track of who owed who what.
Things went downhill, there were people with ten or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they couldn't afford who got screwed at some point of the bridging process.
It seems like two things came to a head to make this all stop:
— The IRS sent inspectors into some churches. It seems that staff members were being personally issued checks for tens of thousands of dollars which were not reported on anyone's taxes and this put up a red flag. This was money that they were being paid back for credit refreshes through the church.
— Chase closed every Church of Scientology bank account they had and would decline any Chase card that was run at any church.
We want to thank our sources who helped us put this together. And this is the first time we’ve heard about IRS inspectors getting involved. If you have more information about the Chase Wave or the details in this account, we’d like to hear from you.
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I remember distinctly being asked by both my AOLA registrar and an IAS fundraiser how much my annual household income was. I was then told by the AO registrar that she could establish a new credit line for me. She had a list of phone numbers that she offered to call on my behalf.
Fortunately, I declined because I felt it was “out ethics” to go into debt.
This scam falls under the mindset, “ the ends justify the means”. In the mind of staff and registrars, nothing is more important than expanding Scientology. So what’s a little debt in the scheme of eternity. $100k, no problem until you’ve lost your house, your car, your company and your sanity.
One of the sources of suicide in the organization.