Fun with banks..

[theducks]

We pay our rent via netbank transfer every two weeks. This last one (on the 19th) was a different amount, so I suspended the automatic transfer on the 18th, and instead paid it manually. Except I suspended it after 6PM sydney time, which mean it didn't go through until the next day.. which meant there were insufficient funds in that account. It then tried again on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th to take the money out, then charged us a $35 dishonour fee.

It took 30 minutes on the phone, but I got it back from the scummy bastards. I pointed out that I didn't care how their system worked and that I'd suspended it before the day it was due, and oh, hey, look at the balances in my other accounts. But it makes me think, if I didn't have another account with a bunch of money in it, would they have given me my money back? The horrible distrustful person in me thinks no.

Have you had luck getting money back from banks?
Discuss.

Comments

[pennae.livejournal.com]

yup - i found out ANZ offers a fee-free account to students, so they refunded me a year's worth of fees because I'd been a student the whole time.

Commonwealth Bank also refunded me the credit card fee for my Awards credit card because I was a student.

[dannipenguin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, ANZ overcharged me on my credit card fee. I rang up to enquire about this, so they refunded the entire fee as a token of goodwill.

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

I need to join this bank. So much cooler then Bankwest from the sounds of things.

[firvulag.livejournal.com]

yeah, I've repeatedly gotten money back from the banks. they love to change student accounts to normal accounts on 1/January. and you are required to show the new ID before you could get it, even though most student ID lasts till March, the banks keep pushing that it changes at the end of the year.

I've also been hit with the insufficient funds fee a few times ($25-35 depending on when it happened) all of which were their fault. 1 the money went into the account in the same batch of transactions, just that they took money out first and then charged me and put money into the account.

National and ANZ have been my success places.

Bankwest are bastards that never helped me with fees i shouldn't have recieved though.

[sparklielizard.livejournal.com]

In the UK recently, a chap won a court case against his bank, arguing that the charges were excessive and didn't reflect the true cost of being overdrawn. Because he won, we can now *all* claim back *every* bank penalty charge for the last six years if we write a letter claiming them and threaten to take the bank to court (the bank would lose due to case law I presume) People are getting thousands back!

Hope someone in Australia does similar :-)

[infamyanonymous.livejournal.com]

Nah, I'm too scared to take on the bank. I do not wish to anger the gods. I greatly fear the words "Bad Credit Rating".

This, however, means they've taken $90 off me. Once, because I didn't realise I could actually get overdrawn, and the second for a similar reason to you. Due to a public holiday my automatic transfer went out two days late (Tuesday instead of Sunday night) but was back-dated to a day when I didn't have enough to transfer.
Now I'm pretty sure the date of them possibly caring is well gone, but delayed automatic transfers caused two honour fees of $45.

Oh, and there's no way to turn off the automatic transfer online, there's no record of it anywhere. Had to ring them up to get it cancelled.

So banks are wankers. I have not had luck, but this may be self-imposed.

[singularity.livejournal.com]

I no longer back with Royal Bank because they did some underhanded things to me. I was stupid and allowed automatic withdrawals from my account to pay student loans. I needed it changed later on due to some issues with how they were charging me when on interest relief and in one case, when I had not even signed loan documents yet. But they refused to talk to me since they had access to my accounts. Then learned I could not cancel the automatic withdrawals. They had PERMANENT access to my account no matter what I did. The only solution was a $20 fee each and every time they want to take money out. The only way to stop things was to close the account out.

Then to make it worse, my dad and I forgot about an account of his that I had access to so he could transfer money to me. They started raiding all of my dad's accounts for money saying access to one account was access to all accounts and my automatic withdrawals now apply to him. This did not go over well. He was able to get the access to remove the withdrawals since he signed no loan documents but would not refund the taken money meaning I had to pay my dad back for withdrawals that should never have happened in the first place since I was on interest relief and was not supposed to make payments!

My father has had a good history with them, but my time was a disaster. It's amazing how they will treat some customers and then treat others badly at the same branch.

[zharradan.livejournal.com]

I've had the opposite experience to some - good times with Bankwest, hassles with ANZ.