It happens again and again. A person either has not accepted the credit card that was provided to him even when he had not requested the credit card, or he was charged for some amount where he did not make the transactions. Mistakes can happen, even though in cases of a financial nature, one would expect a much greater deal of carefulness on the part of the bank. However, what really takes the cake is when the bank refuses to come clean, or behaves in a manner that is totally against accepted consumer service behavior:

Paresh Karia (30), the owner of Jeetendra General Store, a grocery shop near Sonapur Lane in Kurla (W), was in for a shock when he received an ABN Amro credit card statement for June showing Rs 44,900 as due. Karia claimed that he never received the credit card. Karia said he approached the bank several times, but they did not reply. The bank allegedly did not even respond to his advocates’ letters. According to him, the bank has even started sending notices and making calls. “In the last two months, I have received over 15 calls from the bank’s recovery department, threatening me and demanding repayment of the dues and the late fees.”
He said, “In April, one of the bank’s telemarketing executive called me, asking me to apply for the bank’s credit card. At first, I refused, but the executive kept calling me, after which, I took the card. In May, the executive took my signature on the form, and took documents like PAN card and my HSBC Bank statement.” After 15 days, Karia received a confirmation call from the bank to verify the documents. However, Karia refused to give the details on phone and asked the executive to come down to his shop. “The next day, I received a parcel from the bank,” said Karia.

From time to time, the RBI and various Consumer forums have asked banks and other financial institutions to behave, and many times charged penalties, but these incidents keep on happening. It will come to a time when courts will actually start hauling executives of the banks before the court, like a court almost did to the ICICI Chief.

This is about a seemingly big fraud that India’s largest private sector bank is playing on its customers, giving a designation for something, and then doing something that is directly opposite, just so that they can squeeze their customers even more.
I used to work in Chennai, and had an ICICI account over there (that was a salary account). Later, I used the same account for linking to the ICICIDirect stock trading facility. Some time later, I switched jobs and cities, and moved over to the capital city, Delhi. While migrating many of my details, I asked the local ICICI bank about what I should do about my existing account, and they informed me that I can use my account as is, except that checks that I issued would involve an additional charge because of the different city status. Okay, so I stopped using the ICICI Bank account for this purpose, and used my alternative salary account instead for check issual.
However, this always was a bit irritating since the stock trading account being ICICI meant that a lot of inflow and outflow would go through the ICICI account, and not being able to use the money for checks meant a small inconvenience. Imagine my pleasure some time later when I learned that ICICI Bank was now issuing payable-at-par checks. I started using these for regular transactions in Delhi, and imagine the shock when I saw a multi-city charge to my account. Upon asking ICICI Bank about this charge, guess what they told me about the ‘payable-at-par’ checks ?
“Multi-city cheque payment charge is a charge for clearing a payable-at-par cheque at an outstation location (i.e. outside your city).”
Further, this is their definition of what payable-at-par means:
“Please note that ‘Payable at par’ means a cheque is payable at any location in India.”
Very strange. So were they claiming that their earlier checks would not get paid if I gave them to somebody in Delhi ? I don’t see what benefit their customers are getting as per their definition of ‘payable-at-par’, it is only ICICI Bank that can claim that they are also issuing payable at par checks, and yet get away with charging a penalty to their users.
I tried using their complaint site at https://infinity.icicibank.co.in/salesEARWeb/web/rbi/jsp/index.jsp, but it built using Javascript, and the complaint option did not work (maybe they do not want to see complaints)

Recently, I got a call from my spouse about contact from a travel package company. A company called XS Travel Club had contacted my spouse with grand promises of a great package - for Rs. 5000, you get a 3-4 days 4 nights package at locations varying from Mussorie to Shimla to Goa to Bangkok. Sounds good, right ? But there was more. There was 10 complimentary beauty treatments from the various Delhi outlets of BodyCare (typically things such as facials, massages, hair treatment, etc). And there were 10 dining coupons from 5 restaurants in different places in Delhi. Since I had more experience in handling such kind of things, my wife gave my contact to these people, and they contacted me. I talked on the phone to them, asked about the holiday resorts (the names they took sounded good), and even the restaurants looked fine. So I asked them to come over to my office for showing me the package and taking the Rs. 5000 from me.
They were at my office the next day, and everything was there - the stay vouchers, the dining coupons, and the BodyCare coupons. So I started reading and discovered a few interesting things:
- There was a separate processing charge of Rs. 199 mentioned in the terms and conditions
- For every night, there was an additional charge of Rs. 399 to be paid
- Places like Manali / Mussorie / Shimla did not allow the coupons to be used during the following months (yes, you must have guessed by now - the summer months; so no using of these coupons between April and July)
- so, overall they were going to be charging me Rs. 1400 more if I used the travel package (which is almost 30% additional over the Rs. 5000 they wanted to charge initially)
When I spoke to the person who had contacted me, he spoke to his manager (and I could hear the conversation to some degree). In effect, his manager said that they should tell me to take my vacation in August, and not in summer.
By this time, I was not exactly a cool cucumber, and I gave a piece of my mind to the guy who had spoken to me. In effect, what he had done was deceitful since he had not told me these conditions, and since I had opened the fine print, I came to know, else I would not have known.
He assured me that they would not charge these Rs. 1400, and would change the not allowed period of the package to some other time, but when I asked him to make that in the written terms and conditions, he did not respond.
What could have gone wrong ? Learnings:
- If I had taken the coupons without checking, I would have been stuck with those conditions, and would have been cursing myself for not looking at this more carefully.
- If I take the person’s oral committment about getting the money and period waiver without getting that in a written form, it is not something that would have held up later. After all, the person whom I would have spoken to later may deny any suck knowledge and I would have been stuck.

Thus, be very watchful when you see such offers, and always take the time to do a study.

This scenario is one of the biggest fears that people have when dealing with credit cards, and handing this information off to other parties. You hand this off to a person purporting to come from a bank, and then find that charges are being piled on your credit card, and then have to run around in trying to clear yourself of these extra charges. It can get real frustrating and annoying for people to have to deal with such kind of problems. The normal tendency is to blame the bank for keeping such people on their rolls, for having such a process where misuse can happen, and for then being insensitive to the problems they are facing. Read more about the incident:

The manager of a Delhi-based private firm was arrested along with two accomplices on Friday on charges of allegedly making purchases using the credit card of an ICICI bank customer.
“We registered a case on the complaint of Atri and arrested Goyal from the Rohini branch of ICICI Bank. The other two were arrested at the instance of Goyal. During interrogation it was revealed that Goyal is the manager of i-process, an outsourcing private company of ICICI Bank, dealing with credit card users whereas accused Ashish Katyan and Dev Aggarwal were working as recovery agents in another collection agency,” said DCP (outer) Atul Katiyar. “The accused used to contact the customers and introduce themselves using a fake name. Then they used to send Ashish Katyan for collecting the card from consumers. Instead of blocking the cards, the three used to go shopping.

The basis for the information that these thieves come up with is information that the bank has revealed to them, so the bank should be the one to blame for this. In the process of reducing their costs by outsourcing this service, they have let such a thing happen, and hence need to be penalized. If this was a country with stronger implementation of privacy and data theft laws, the bank would be in serious trouble.

Say you are out shopping, and you do not notice that your purse of wallet has got stolen, or that you left it somewhere ? And somebody unscrupulous picks up your card and makes some large purchases in the time period that you have not reported the loss ? Well, then you are out of luck. As per major banks, your liability ends when you have reported the card stolen. Not yet declared the card stolen, or postponed for some time ? Well, then you are responsible for purchases made on the card. The twist is when you have found the card stolen, but need some time to hunt down the hotline number and go through the card stolen routine with the call-center ? As you will read, it is possible for a fast thief to use the card to make some heavy purchases in that time period, and leave you holding the bill:

Delhi’s Nishi Uttam recently complained that her wallet, which carried an ABN Amro Bank debit card, was stolen at a shopping mall. It took her 15 minutes to figure out how to report the loss to the bank’s helpline. Unfortunately, during this interim period, says Uttam, the card was fraudulently used by a man to buy jewellery worth Rs 36,000. She thus filed an FIR with the police, too.
In a written statement, ABN Amro Bank explains its stand on such cases: “…if the transactions have been made prior to reporting of the loss to the bank, then the liability rests with the customer to whom the card has been issued. This is as per the terms and conditions under which the card is issued.”Typically, banks tread this line in such cases, even as a senior Delhi banker concedes it would well take “10-15 minutes to run and report a loss complaint”.

In such cases, the customer is normally at the receiving end. It is not so easy to realize that your card is missing, or keep the card number and the hotline number handy, and it may take some time to get through the normally busy bank call center; and this much time may be enough to get some big items bought in your name. What are the solutions ?
1. Report a loss as early as possible
2. Keep the card number in your mobile phone
3. Keep the bank call center number in your mobile phone
4. Do not take this casually, and be sure to file the FIR as well when you find a loss of money