Forget about a $1,000 restaurant bill. Sonja Morgan is being accused of trying to dodge a much larger tab.
After Page Six exclusively revealed that Morgan was banned from Tucci restaurant for leaving without paying a $1,000 bill she assumed was complimentary, a small HVAC company contacted us, claiming she failed to pay for a job it did last year at her former Upper East Side townhouse.
The Brooklyn-based company, Expert Appliance Group Inc., informed Page Six that it performed an installation at Morgan’s previous residence in February 2024, for which she paid nearly $20,000 using Chase bank’s Zelle payment system.
However, Expert was taken aback when, 14 months later, Chase notified them of a “transaction dispute,” resulting in the disappearance of Morgan’s payment from their 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.”
