Chase Bank USA Chase charged late fee for 53 months in row when account was paid in time Elgin Illinois

 You are an adult(I hope) and as such there is a point and time when YOU must take responsibility for your actions(or shall I say inactions).

If we are to take it as you say and this all goes back to one month where they failed to make a payment, yes that was a mistake. Where you would have a very valid complaint that they shouldn't charge you any penalties for the payment not being taken.  But it does not take away from the fact that you still owe the payment.   So if it took you 1 or even 2 months to discover this...you would have a valid complaint to have the late fees and additional interest waived.  But it doesn't give you a "free pass" to expect the same validity if you wait several months or years.

Regardless of if they are taking payments automatically or not it is still YOUR responsibility to monitor your account(s) to verify that everything is correct, and if something is incorrect to dispute it then..not 53 months..not 48..not 36..not 24..not 12..not even 6 months after the error. 

But a few things just don't add up.  First of all if you had payments being automatically deducted, they will deduct the minimum payment owed..which would have included the missed payment from the month before as well as any fees.  So it should have "self-corrected" itself within a month..if payments were in fact being deducted.   But if the payments weren't deducted you should have realized this by the extra money in your bank account.  The only way I can see that this "MAY" have happened, is if in your automatic payments somehow you entered a "set" amount.  But again in this case it would be your responsibility to verify that the set amount YOU entered was going to cover your minimum payment.