GEORGE NEWS - A client of First National Bank (FNB) for 30 years, Gerrit van Dyk from Wilderness, has had an amount of about R2 000 deducted by debit order from his bank account under the reference 'Telkom' for several months. He says he never authorised the debit order.
The amount varied slightly every month, but it was always just over R2 000.
Repeated efforts and many frustrating phone calls to get FNB to stop this from happening were fruitless.
Van Dyk was referred to Telkom. This company confirmed that he indeed never authorised a debit order and told him that nowhere on their systems was an amount debited to his account. The bank started reversing the transaction every month, but was unable to stop it from being deducted. Van Dyk eventually decided to close his account. It cost him R18 every time the amount was reversed, and several minutes on the phone.
"It seems that my money is not safe with FNB. They cannot stop the debit order, only change the amounts. How pathetic. So any hacker can feed anything into their computer to let the money go off your account. FNB is not interested in why I closed my account. Not even if I say it was fraud. So I have moved to another bank, with immense trouble and the red tape of carrying over debit orders. More pathetic is Telkom that does not respond. Not even after two letters and two weeks."
Van Dyk does not have an account with Telkom since he and his family use the prepaid method to pay for calls and data.
FNB Consumer Core Banking CEO Ryan Prozesky told the newspaper that Van Dyk was advised to liaise directly with Telkom to resolve the matter.
"Customers are able to view which current debit orders are running off their account through our digital channels and have the ability to stop, dispute and reverse debit orders they believe are unauthorised. When stopping a particular unauthorised debit order, customers are able to specify a rand value or range of amounts to prevent debit orders from a particular collector to be processed in the future. It is advisable for customers to select a wide rand value range to make sure that the unauthorised collector cannot simply change the rand value and thereby circumvent the 'stop' instruction."
He did not respond to a query as to what is meant by a "wide" rand value. It is doubtful if this matters. It seems Van Dyk did not have the ability to stop the debit order.
Leigh-Ann Francis, Telkom media relations specialist, promised to escalate the complaint and "make sure it gets resolved". This was on 12 February.
The 'Telkom' debit order deduction that had Gerrit van Dyk close his account at FNB.
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