Just before Christmas last year, my account with the Bendigo Bank was scammed.  Crooks got the Bank to charge my Mastercard account with the bank for just under $5000.  Then they got at me on the phone – waking me from my siesta and unable to find my glasses.  They said they were from the Bank and asked whether I authorised the charge that I could see on the account on the bank website.  No – I had not authorised the debit .  I wanted to keep one card open. I therefore spoke to them. The conversation seemed odd, very odd  – but so does almost any conversation I have with a bank.  Its very oddity is evidence of its genuineness.  I terminated it when they asked me to shift money.  Then I spoke to security at the Bank, and made arrangements to be able to get cash over Christmas.  The bank said – it ruled – that it would take 45 days to deal with the scam.  Why not 45 minutes?

After that time, I wrote asking for the account to be corrected.  The amount stolen by the crooks still appeared – in the red.  Someone rang.  I asked for  written response.  Someone rang. They said they would try to ‘elevate’ the process.   And eventually I got a written response.  It was from Cheryl at ‘Card and Merchant Disputes’.  I did not know there was a ‘dispute’.

We have investigated the transaction on your behalf and would like to take this opportunity to raise the below points: • You have advised that you received a phone call from an unknown third party. The third party have advised they were from IT support. • The third party advised you to download an app on your phone. • When exchanging messages with the unknown third party, you have clicked on a link provided by them. Within this link you provided your card number, CCV, expiry date and further personal details this has allowed them to process the debit to your account. • By clicking the link and entering your details, you have therefore become an active participant to the transaction. • The disputed transaction has been verified by Mastercard Identity Check, a one-time password (OTP) was sent via SMS to your mobile number that ends with #583, the OTP was entered into the payment process to authorise the transaction. After taking into consideration these factors, we advise that we will not be providing a refund to you. On the balance of probabilities, we have determined that the transaction appears to have been authorised by you or you have contributed to the loss by giving consent to a known user to perform the transaction.

The problem was that the account had been debited before the crooks spoke to me.  As best as I can see, the bank is saying that ‘the transaction appears to have been authorised by you or you have contributed to the loss’ – whatever that may mean at law – after the website showed the transaction.

Another problem was that the crooks could only have got my phone number from the bank.  That means they have breached their obligation of confidentiality – and are liable to me on that ground alone.  For that matter, how did the crooks know the transaction showed in the accounts of the bank as having taken place?   Does the bank  now say their website was misleading about the status of the dealing?

Another problem is that while purporting to make findings of fact on the balance of probabilities, they do not disclose any legal basis for the conclusions they purport to present.

So, they tried a different tack.  This from Jensen, Manager.

The disputed transaction was verified by Mastercard Identity Check, a one-time password (OTP) was sent via SMS to your registered mobile number with the bank ending in #583, the OTP was entered into the payment process to authorise the transaction. For this reason, we have no recovery rights via Mastercard schemes to process a fraud-related chargeback. Unfortunately, you have been the victim of perpetrated fraud. We would recommend you follow this up with police or the merchant directly as we have no further recovery rights.

To clarify:

Bendigo Bank does not have a legal right to take action on these dispute claims.  We are bound by Mastercard Scheme regulations as Mastercard is the provisioner of the cards.  As detailed in your decline letter, we do not have recovery rights via the Scheme process due to the nature of how the transactions were processed.

And again:

The bank did not debit your Mastercard account. Your credit card ending in x6178 was a Bendigo Bank Mastercard.  Your card details and one-time passcode were utilised to make a payment to Worldremit. The transaction appears to be the result of your interaction with a company called IT support. Bendigo Bank have no recovery rights for the transaction and therefore we cannot reimburse you for this value.  Bendigo Bank cannot recover the funds as the transaction was performed via Mastercard Identity Check, a one-time password (OTP) was sent via SMS to your mobile number that ends with #583, the OTP was entered into the payment process to authorise the transaction. If a transaction is performed via this method Bendigo Bank is unable to raise a chargeback claim via Mastercard.

And in case we were not clear:

That is correct the Bank has no recovery rights for this transaction as we are bound by Mastercard schemes.  I cannot assist you any further as previously stated so please escalate to AFCA if you wish to take this further.

That is Australian banking for you.  Whatever your legal or moral rights are here in Oz, we must toe the line of our American Overlord, under an agreement you know nothing of.  And if they do not have to indemnify us, we will not indemnify you.  The question is whether you the customer or we the bank must bear the loss occasioned by crooks on our accounts with you.  And we decree that you will take the loss – although we have not troubled you with our conclusions about your rights or our obligations under Australian law.

There is something else.  If you have been scammed, be very careful what you say to the bank.  They are recording everything  – and will not scruple to use what you say against you – their customer – at the direction of their patron – with no caution or warning.  With every day, banks become more like insurers – just say No.

Well – whatever else may be said, all that looks unconscionable.  And as it happens, that is yet another ground of complaint at law.

And then there is the delay.  Five months.  This is up there with the Motor Registration Branch, Qantas, Fines Victoria, Veterans’ Affairs, Centrelink, and Putin’s Russia.  All thrillingly world class.  String them along until they drop – and then keep charging them.  The Vets call it ‘Delay, Deny, Die.’ 

This is what our public life has come to.

It is as if the Banking Royal Commission never happened.

I can attend to it – just another lapse into nuisance in a moral vacuum – but how often do they get away with it?  What about the Syrian widow out in the western burbs, or the unlettered First Nations man at Yuendemu, or the deserted and bashed wife on a gurney in casualty?

Then there are the poor and disconsolate in New York – little Mastercard.

We work to connect and power an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company.

It could be revealing to compare their DQ to our conscience.  There is nothing safe, simple, smart or accessible about this little mess.

First quarter profit of $US 3 billion.  Ah, those poor souls in New York, my favourite city.  First Mastercard – then Donald Trump.

Well, it will be an addition to the chapter in the draft book The War Against Humanity dealing with banks – in the extracts that follow.  (The Team at Bendigo has the draft of the book and a draft writ seeking trial by jury of a claim for damages, including exemplary damages.  Water off a duck’s back.  What matters is the templates of Uncle Sam.)

Book extracts

National Australia Bank

The following letters show why I left a bank that I and my mum and dad had banked with from time immemorial.

23 March 2012

Mr Cameron Clyne
Chief Executive Officer
National Australia Bank
Reply Paid 2870
MELBOURNE, VIC.  8060

Dear Mr Clyne

SALES TEAM D

You don’t know me.  Neither do any of your employees.  Since you have been my banker for 60 years, I think that that is very sad.  Don’t you think that is very sad, Mr Clyne?

When I bought my present house, I was subjected to treatment by some of your operatives that in part caused me to write the attached paper on ‘The Decline of Courtesy and the Fall of Dignity.’  You will see that your bank has the misfortune there to be compared to Telstra and Qantas.  That is not good company to be in, Mr Clyne.  The part that really got me was the threat – that is exactly what it was – to pull the pin – that was the phrase – on a bank cheque.  Your staff could give a customer a heart attack threatening to do that to them on the day that they are settling on a house purchase.  A bank threatening to renege on its own paper?  It is hard to imagine a better example of how banks have lost their way – how once respectable business houses have now become unrespectable counting houses.

Being minded to move home, I thought I should confirm my leeway with your bank before making an offer.  I drew Sales Team D in the lottery.  I said I was happy to go to your Kyneton Branch and talk face to face, but, no, Sales Team D told me they were on top of my case.

Your staff can fill you in on the sad results, Mr Clyne.  I had to prove my identity – at least twice.  Sad after 60 years, is it not?  The property I am looking at is worth under half of a city property that I can offer for security.  The increase to the existing facility is modest.  For any bank that knew me as its customer, and wanted to look after me, the proposed transaction would hardly raise a query.  Not so with Sales Team D, Mr Clyne.  I was required to produce tax returns, and then told I would have to surrender one credit card and submit to a reduction on the remainder.  I began to feel for the people of Greece.  Now, Sales Team D wants to go beyond the tax returns, and I now have two accountants wondering just what has got into Sales Team D.

How would you or your fellow directors like it if they were treated like this by someone they have been doing business with for ten minutes, let alone 60 years?  In the course of more than 40 years’ legal practice, I have held various statutory appointments, including running the Taxation Division of the AAT, later VCAT for 18 years.  Some people – including Her Majesty the Queen in right of the State of Victoria – therefore felt able to take me at my word.  But not Sales Team D.  Do you know why, Mr Clyne?  My bank does not know who I am.

Perhaps they are worried about my recent expenditure on credit cards.  Let me assure you, Mr Clyne, so was I.  Very worried and very annoyed.  I bought a CLK Mercedes about six months ago at a very good price.  I just needed to extend a borrowing facility by six thousand to get the $26,000.  I got handballed around four operatives, having to prove my identity along the way.  I got referred to various teams.  Most asked my occupation.  (Sales Team D the other day asked if I was still a member of a firm I left about ten years ago and which ceased to exist the other day.)  I was told my case was difficult because the facility was secured.  Then I was asked to produce tax returns to support a request to extend a secured facility by six thousand dollars.  That is when I gave up, and used the credit card to buy the Mercedes.

I do not blame any of the few employees you have left.  They are trained – programmed – to be automated and not to think.  They also know that the market, which can never be wrong, values their contribution to the bank at about one hundredth of yours.

Do you know what I think, Mr Clyne?  George Orwell was wrong.  It is not big government that is tearing up the fabric of our community by Big Brother – it is Big Money, and Big Corporations.  I think that you and your fellow directors should be ashamed of yourselves.

If it matters, I hold shares in the bank, and I am not a happy shareholder either.

Yours sincerely

Geoffrey Gibson

3 April 2012

Mr Cameron Clyne
Chief Executive Officer
National Australia Bank
Reply Paid 2870
MELBOURNE, VIC, 8060.

Dear Mr Clyne,

SALES TEAM D

Well, they did it for you.  Sales Team D – may we just call them STD for short? – stopped me from buying the new home that I wanted.  It was not perfect – it was just ideal.  Ideal for me, Mr Clyne.  But, then, what is a mere home to someone like me to a great Australian banker?

How did STD manage to pull it off, you may ask, Mr Clyne?  Quite simply really.  They did not know me, and they did not know what they were doing.  This all became sadly but inevitably apparent when a roaming STD cell-commandant opened his phone talk with me after my first letter to you with the gambit that my problem was that I had overstated my income.  Really, Mr Clyne, your attack-dogs and flak-catchers would want to be on the highest level of dental insurance if they want to go around behaving like that.  No wonder you forbid them to meet your customers in the flesh.

But I suppose that the ADs and FCs of STD kept you safe from my letter.  You would prefer to stay like Achilles gleaming among his Myrmidons, except that you would not stay sulking in your tent – no, you would be glowing over all that lucre.

You and the people at STD are a real threat to business in this country, Mr Clyne.  You should be helping the flow of capital.  The big Australian banks are doing just the reverse.

And you should really stop those ads that tell the most dreadful lies.  Lies like your people are free to make decisions, or that the big banks like competition.  Nothing could be further from the truth, Mr Clyne.  The people at STD know that they are forbidden to think, much less make decisions, and STD shut up shop completely, and have been in a surly sulk ever since I told them I was talking to another bank.  (Although they did ring the other bank to inquire – without my consent – about what I was doing.)  The major Australian banks are just a collusive cartel operating sheltered workshops that rely on the people of Australia to bail them out whenever they balls it up – and then they pass on their guilt and paranoia to those same people by refusing to lift a finger for their customers when they need a bank.

Those people do not hold your staff responsible for the shocking fall in the standards of our banks, Mr Clyne.  They hold you and your like responsible.  You do after all get paid about one hundred times as much as the folk of STD.

If you and your board step outside your cocoon of moolah, minders, and sycophants, you will not find one Australian – not one – that has a kind word for any of you.  What all those people should do to the big banks is to take their business elsewhere.  That is what I will do.  You never know, Mr Clyne, I may meet a real person in the flesh, one who might know what they are doing, and who will even know who I am.

Yours sincerely,

Geoffrey Gibson

*

In accordance with procedures laid down, I got no response to either letter.  I sold my shares in the bank.  I concluded a post containing these letters with the following:

How did we let this happen?  How did we come under the heel of people whom we would cross the street to avoid?

BENDIGO BANK

After I quit the NAB, I took such business as I have, which isn’t much, to the Bendigo Bank.  They have the same problem as other banks.  They don’t train or trust their staff – the two are related. 

And as the following post shows, they can treat their customers like dirt up there with the best of them.

This post is written in anger. 

This afternoon, I needed access to my accounts online with the Bendigo Bank.  I could not get on their site on this laptop.  I therefore screwed up my courage to ring them.  No one likes ringing a bank or Telstra.  After the usual noughts and crosses games, the computer gave me a quote of a delay time of eight to twelve minutes.  Not good – but bearable.  I then got subjected to that banal repeated propaganda that tells you so much about the mentality of those running these outfits – both banal and grasping.  That lasted thirty minutes before I hung up in disgust.  THIRTY MINUTES – out of my life because a bloody bank can’t get its act together – decently, or at all.

The original quote of delay time was wantonly reckless if not downright fraudulent.  I was not given the option of taking a call back if I wanted it.  And the propaganda kept repeating the same dreadful lie – ‘Your call shall be answered shortly.’ 

The directors of the Bendigo Bank should be deeply and personally ashamed of the way that they manage their bank.  They obviously chase profit so that they mistreat their customers.  That is not good business.  As it happens, I hold shares in that bank.  And I am now deeply offended as a shareholder – because I personally do not want to be a part of a business that is so rude to people and that treats you and me as just means to their ends.  The conduct of these directors sadly reflects the collapse of courtesy and common decency in our public life.  What kind of person would now trust what a bank said?

I repeat – the directors of the Bendigo Bank should be deeply and personally ashamed of the way that they manage their bank. 

And it did not take those bastards long to wash Ken Hayne right out of their hair.

Later when buying watch from a Hong Kong dealer, for which I was required to transfer money in AU$ ‘by wire’ to Hong Kong, I was told that the transaction required my personal attendance at a branch of the Bendigo Bank to give effect to that transaction.  And, as happens with a bank or the police, I was asked to show my driver’s licence.  You can imagine how well that throwback to the Gold Rush went down in Hong Kong. 

I would later undergo similar conniptions in buying a flat and selling a house.  I want to be there when a bank officer says: ‘Yes, Mr Murdoch. You can have that billion dollars – but only after you show up downtown with your driver’s licence.’

Formality above humanity.