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As much as anything this is the barking of an enraged FrayedBear who seemingly is living the life of a deluded snowflake thinking that he is correct.
Here is my rant:
01.10.2018 Message received from St George saying:

"St George Notification: Transaction occurred on card ending 0855 at 'WWW.INGOGO.MOBI TAXI P' for $40.61 at 10:56. If fraud reply 'Fraud'. No action required if genuine."

Now, this was lucky. I had just got up and for the first time in 3 days switched on the phone that the message had been sent to. Naturally, I replied "Fraud" as I have no St George account. The card number was correct however for a debit card.

About 45 minutes later a pleasant sounding woman phoned to tell me four $40 taxi charges had been processed against the card. I wanted to know where but she couldn't say. I then verified four payments which I had actually made sometime before as being correct. She then said that the entries would be reversed from my account however it would take a few days for it to occur. In the meantime, my card was cancelled and they would issue a new card. That card arrived about a week later.

After a few, days I took it into the bank to activate it. In the process of doing so, the teller told me that there was a $600 credit limit on the card. The card is a debit card only. At the time I did not say anything.

12.10.2018 I went into the bank to ensure that the card, in fact, has the limits of $150 per day that I set up on it. This is the amount that I have set as being the greatest amount that I am prepared to lose out of my bank account... Normally I simply go into the bank and put into the account the cash needed to cover a transaction that I contemplate at that moment. I then make the transaction over the internet.

Oh dear me, you are not supposed to do things like this! Particularly when there is only one teller on duty, on her first day and she is trying to impress the manageress. "Would you mind sitting down until I see these other customers?"
So being a nice guy I sat down and patiently waited, eventually they, clerk and managers, took me into a side office saying "we would like to do this correctly and get you to sign these forms". So while everyone messed around signing on and signing off that computer in the office I chatted with the manageress. She had felt it necessary to now come in and assist as I was showing signs of having problems with being told that my debit card was a credit card with a $600 line of credit.

As I pointed out any credit occurring is between my bank and the card provider, in this case, Visa. I am a creditor of the bank, not a debtor. Therefore I expect when I purchase something to be able to simply use the money that the bank owes me - there is no credit involved!

So after learning about the bank manager's beliefs that it is perfectly correct for gratuitous (benefitless to the payer) profits to be made out of people and that people do not owe the country that they live in anything, I realised that I am living in a different world to the one that I grew up in and expected to be living in now. In that world bank tellers greeted me by my name, filled my forms or cheques out for me and politely wished me good morning after completing the task with nothing more than a pen and adding machine in sight. This bank manager saw nothing wrong with someone being paid $1.50 for every tax return that the tax office processed through the Mickey Mouse program that they had written about 25 years ago. By my estimation a twentyfold overcharge to the Australian taxpayer. For all I know they are still receiving their royalty.

Accordingly, after deleting all the blanks that left alternative options that could be completed after my departure, I signed the piece of paper, correction: two pieces of paper saying that I wanted four payments of approximately $40 refunded to my account.
"We will attend to that immediately" I was told and so I departed.

Sitting in the car outside it occurred to me that it would be wise to ascertain the current balance on the account. So a quick trip to the ATM opposite where I was parked and it offered me and I took the option of printing the last 8 transactions. The 8 stated that there were not four dodgy payments made from my account but six. Two more had occurred after I had spoken to the internal fraud people. Furthermore, the four transactions that I had just requested be reversed had already been reversed supposedly on the same date that I was contacted.

So back into the bank I traipsed to find that the clerk is standing talking to other customers still holding my two pieces of paper in her hand. I explained her error to her and took the two pieces of paper from her hand. She proceeded to tell me that the first piece of paper need not be sent in. I remonstrated simply saying "well I don't know that. You read the computer and told me only a few minutes ago these transactions were present on my account therefore they stand and I want them reversed along with the two additional ones that I have now found. This would appear to be a systemic error." On Monday I shall have to demand a statement to ensure that this has occurred!
Two hours later at 5:36 pm. I received another message from St George telling me that the transactions have been reversed but will take up to three days to appear on my statement. In other words they are stealing my money for another three days on top of the ten days that it has already been stolen.

The day continued in equally abysmal fashion. I took some goods to the charity shop and as I was parking was shouted at "don't park there, can't you see there is an ambulance in front of you and they want to put this man on the stretcher gurney into the ambulance". Indeed there was a character looking very disreputable lying on the stretcher gurney. The two ambulance officers would have had fun pushing the gurney over the four-inch high kerb. In front of my vehicle, I had left two vacant car parking spaces before the ambulance's open rear door. More than sufficient room to manoeuvre their patient into the rear of the ambulance. For some reason, the male ambulance driver joined in the fray angrily shouting at me "well then you stay parked there". No wonder they get assaulted with that sort of anger problem. So I responded, "you have plenty of room to manoeuvre, I am a disabled person and have goods to deliver to the shop". In the end, I simply restarted my motor and drove off to deliver the goods to another op shop. What sort of dope are these ambos using?

In this clever age, I wonder how many times this nonsense is occurring around the world and how many people, like the bank manager, could not give a brass razoo and thus not query such transactions or bother to follow them up?

In similar fashion I recently learnt that the electricity smart meters can be zeroed by the supply company and they do not have to keep a record of the meter reading immediately before they zero it.

Seemingly I am the only person in nearly 7 million consumers in Australia to have queried the honesty and morals of such a procedure.

You may be wondering how this could be a problem to me. The fact is the meter reading showed that I had supplied 38,000 kilowatt hours of electricity back into the grid and they were not going to pay me for it. My bill did not reflect this fact but had some mythical half hourly usage based calculation used to determine how much I owed them. Unfortunately, it is based upon a closing meter reading that they do not have a record of.

FrayedBear 9 Oct 12
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4 comments

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1

i hear you, loud & clear. personally, i wouldn't do business with any of the fossil-fuel-industry supporting banks. here in nsw i'm happy with southern cross credit union. friendly staff, that acknowledges you not only as a client, but as a person.

2

How far from "frayed" to "totally unravelled"?

Coffeo Level 8 Oct 12, 2018

A very long way. "Except for me and thee the whole world is mad in my opinion... And I'm not too sure about thee!"

1

I like your rant and I am keen to join in. The year was 1988. The country still had a cool side to it before Johnny Howard and consorts turned it into the meanest country if not on Earth so at least on the southern hemisphere. My first Oz driver licence (issued in Queensland) had no photo. It didn't even look like a licence it just looked like an old-fashioned postcard. Brisbane was just a large country town in Banana bender country. This idyll was, however, treacherous. Banks were already criminal organisations.
The year was a memorable indeed because it was in that very double 8 year that I settled in this former and not so former colony down under. And it was the first time in my life which had begun 34 years earlier, that I borrowed money. I borrowed it from a bank. I think it made me an accomplice in the dirty business of miraculously creating money out of thin air.
My then wife and I purchased a house and paid about 50% of the amount due in cash and borrowed the other $35000 from the Commonwealth Bank if Australia or CBA for short.
We were new to Australia and had really now idea about how this country was functioning, so we kept about $ 18000 in a cash account. My reasoning was to have enough money to buy a car and have enough cash for the loan repayments. Of course interests for the money we owed was substantially higher than for the money we had sitting in a cash account.
When the first repayment was automatically deducted from our cash account I was curious and calculated the amount that we should have paid. According to my calculation there was a discrepancy, guess in whose favour, of several dollars.
So I went to see the bank manager who just looked and acted like your local bank manager: jovial at first but firm. So I asked him how these interests were calculated.
He gave me the formula. I invited him to give me a demonstration. He obliged and, perhaps to his own real surprise, his result was different to the one printed on the account statement. He repeated the operation 3 times with slight variations but none of his results matched the figure on the account.
He then rang the branch were the figure should have originated. Now he was the curious customer and was told to wait and wait and wait a little longer. After all this waiting he was just promised that someone would investigate the matter and get back to him. He then dutifully told me the same story.
The next payment came but not the information.

The same bank that promised me a bank card line of credit but reneged someone apparently writing on my file "don't give the bastard any money he has been here less than six months!" Similarly, the NRMA had said that they would give me a personal loan in order to fully pay for a motor vehicle. They then declined and offered HP instead. That actually turned out in my favour as it left them owning and responsible for the vehicle when it was stolen by a motor trader claiming disputed commission from the dealer that I purchased from.

2

Well ... you discovered one tip of one iceberg in a polar sea. ...

Cynicism will get you far young man!
??????

@FrayedBear My daughter had subscribed to a TELSTRA mobile phone contract. Part of the deal was that she was given 6 SIM cards for data exchange. The phone numbers were handwritten on each card respectively.

The next month my daughter discovered a minor amount, but an amount charged against one of those numbers. Over the phone nothing could be done. We went to the shop where she had signed the new contract. The employee investigated and gave some explanation.
It was fortunate that my daughter have never even removed any of the SIM cards from their original frame.
So TELSTRA had to remove the fraudulently decuted amount but never apologised or gave an official eplanation.
The employee explained that companies send out messages to customers and any ANY reply will be registered as giving consent to being billed. Obviously that has to happen with the full knowledge and cooperation of TELSTRA。

@FrayedBear I have witnessed dozens of stories and seen the documents establishing the veracity of them. Banks, insurers and similar organisations are truly criminal organisations ... but they are too big to fail.

@PontifexMarximus Yeah, I found that out forty years ago with Citibank. Some do if weak governments don't bail them out.

@PontifexMarximus Talking of insurance companies I had one chasing me 18 months for about $1300 claiming that I had run into the rear of their client's 3-year-old car. Eventually, they sent me the repair quote and photos. All very nice. One problem the quote was dated two weeks prior to the date that I supposedly drove into her car. They tried to carry on saying it was an admin error by the repairman. "See you in court Mr Insurance Company senior solicitor." My own insurance company told me that they would not have fought the issue that long, simply paid it and charged me in excess and increased premiums!

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