Sunday, April 30, 2006

Banks!

It's definite; I hate my bank.

Last week I got a letter from the Fraud team at my bank saying that our credit cards may have been involved in some sort of nasty international credit card fraud, and could I please call them.

So I did.

The nice lady on the phone told me that because of the aforementioned fraud, they'd cancelled a couple of our credit card transactions and wanted our consent to have the cards themselves cancelled. She promised our replacement cards would be couriered in two days' time.

This was bad enough, because one of the transactions they cancelled was the boy's subscription to the online game, World of Warcraft. One evening he just couldn't get into the game, and spent the next couple of hours looking like someone who'd gone home to find someone had bulldozed his house.

The other transaction they cancelled was the payment for our passport applications.

And then...
the new credit cards didn't arrive. The courier didn't come by on the Friday, when he was expected. He didn't come on Saturday either. Without a credit card, this afternoon's Baby-free time was spending looking forlornly through the shop windows.

But wait - there's more.
On Saturday I received our latest credit card bill. I'd barely gotten over discovering that, if your minimum repayment is even one day past the due date, there's a $25 late fee. Hell, I thought the exhorbitant interest rate was a late fee. The next thing I discovered was that we were charged credit card cancellation fees.

That's right. Our credit cards were cancelled because the bank's security is shite, and we're being charged for the privilege.

Bank of New Zealand, I am not impressed.

6 comments:

Frally said...

That's got me worked up into angry letter writing mode!!! Tell me if you want me to write one for you, don't let them get away with that one!

The Skirt said...

Call them and complain - demand that they refund the cancellation fee. You should also give them a really hard time for not explaining which transactions they cancelled - passport applications are surely listed as such! Ohhh and give them hell about the new credit cards not arriving.

BTW, I thought all this was meant to have been sorted by the end of Easter? Why did it take so long?

Violet said...

Very kind of you frally, but I rang them this morning because I'm an angry woman and couldn't wait.

The results of my irate call are described in the very next post...

darth said...

hey, i just got that letter too, over here!! what was really creepy is i got a CALL on sunday, telling me to expect a "letter concerning your ATM card", but he didn't have any other information. wtf? Then, the letter said, "from what we can tell, you have not been affected..however, we are changing your card anyways for security reasons, so it won't be available to you til you get your new one" wtf?

stupid banks.

Kazzer said...

In the bank's defence, they can't help it that their IT system sucks and their security is laughable. After all, they hardly make any profit so how can they be expected to implement robust solutions?
Try TSB.

shannon said...

oh, wow!!! well, i can sympathize with your boy... i'd go nuts without WoW even for a day.. lol!! but you should feel grateful that you didn't have to pay for any fraudulent credit card transactions, most people aren't as lucky as you are in that it was caught very early, as well.