Corrupt bankers!

Monday 31.01.11

Today was a bit of a ‘nothing’ day and we pottered around the house for most of the morning.  Then we headed to town to look for a fridge and I went to the bank to withdraw money.  After waiting in line for an hour I was told that the network was down so they could not process international transactions.  Then another lady told me it might be working now so she went to check.  When she informed me it was I gave her my card with the request for $AUD250 (20,000 KSH).  After a few minutes she returned saying that the machine was reading ‘sanction declined’ which meant that my bank had disallowed the transaction.

As I had already done over the counter transactions before I knew this was not true and asked her to try again but she would not, stating that there was no point as my bank would not sanction it.  At this point I was becoming increasingly angry and decided it was better to leave and try again another day.  I borrowed some money from Tammi and we headed back towards home.  We stopped at Nakumatt and bought a fridge and it was delivered for us too.

When I got home I checked my bank account online, only to find out that $AUD250 had indeed been deducted from my account.  I was pretty annoyed as I should have figured out earlier that the whole thing was dodgy and it could have been two or three corrupt staff members working together to rip me off.  Though I still thought that there was the possibility that the machine had experienced an error and if I returned tomorrow they would see that they had cash unaccounted for and would apologise for the mistake and give me the cash.

I called the bank at this stage, and asked if the transaction could be cancelled.  They then informed me that not only one but three withdrawals of $250 had been attempted!  Fortunately the automatic security system had recognised the suspiciousness of this and denied the final two transactions.  So as advised, I cancelled my card as I didn’t want the bank staff to continue withdrawing money from my account!

I had a pretty restless sleep worrying about the money and returning to the bank in the morning!