Forget about a $1,000 restaurant bill. Sonja Morgan is being accused of trying to dodge a much larger tab.
After Page Six exclusively reported on Morgan getting blacklisted from Tucci restaurant for walking out on a $1,000 she thought was comped, a small HVAC company got in touch with us alledging she stiffed it over a job it did last year at her former Upper East Side townhouse.
Brooklyn-based Expert Appliance Group Inc. told Page Six it completed an installation at Morgan’s old pad in Feb. 2024, and she paid it nearly $20,000 via Chase bank’s Zelle payment system.
Then Expert was stunned when, 14 months later, Chase told it there was “a dispute about a transaction” and Morgan’s money disappeared from its account.
The company was perplexed since they received “no complaints [and] no explanation” from Morgan. “”[The money was] just gone,” Expert told us.
To make matters worse, Expert claims Chase’s “disrespectful” claims department told them: tough luck. “What happened to us was frustrating,” said an Expert representative, “The way Chase reversed the full payment after over a year, based only on one-sided statements, without even asking us or looking at documents… made us realize how unprotected small businesses really are in situations like this.”
Expert says it called and email Morgan several times, but didn’t hear back until Page Six got involved.
Morgan seemed just as perplexed about the situation as Expert. She confirmed she paid for the service in 2024, but “what happened afterward was entirely out of my control,” she said.
“Had [the owner] simply texted me – as we’ve always done – to say the [payment] had been reversed I would have addressed it immediately,” she said.
Chase would not comment on the matter, but a source familiar with the situation told us the bank returned the funds to the business after we reached out on Wednesday.
Expert told us: “We are in the process of revaluating our relationship with Chase Bank, including whether maintaining our business accounts there moving forward aligns with the needs of our company.”
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