It appals me how many South African bank account holders have their accounts plundered by debit orders they didn’t authorise and know nothing about.
Banks don’t check whether the electronic debit order instructions they receive are based on a legitimate mandate or not – they simply process them and charge their fees.
And in many cases, those who notice the unfamiliar debits and query them with their banks don’t get much help, which leaves them feeling doubly abused.
If they do manage to track down the company that has helped itself to their money without authorisation, they are often made to wait a ridiculous amount of time before they are refunded.
What an outrage.
A company that has an appalling history of putting through unauthorised debits is Bellville-based Platinum Africa, also known as Platinum eProducts, or PlatinumC3 (Platinum Credit Card Corporation), which targets low-income earners and sells contracts for airtime, credit, medical, roadside assistance and other services.
The company’s business dealings have have been investigated by the government, banks and the media in recent years and the company is no stranger to this column.
In 2007, 19 of its telesales agents were fired for gross misconduct after a nationwide investigation of hundreds of complaints about the way in which consumers’ bank accounts were debited, and since then a series of company spokesmen have made earnest undertakings to root out the bad apples and put systems in place to protect consumers.
In 2010 the National Credit Regulator issued a compliance notice ordering Platinum Telecash to identify all consumers who had been incorrectly charged excessive initiation fees and other illegal charges, and refund them within 60 business days.
And now the company is blaming “an IT error” for the fact that 62 dormant accounts were “unintentionally reinstated” last year, with the result that 62 people had Platinum debit orders going off their bank accounts.
An error is one thing – making the victims of that error wait months to get their money back is quite another.
Ernie Siems of Centurion “signed up” with PlatinumC3 in November 2009 and cancelled a month later.
In February this year he noticed that the company was debiting his account again.
“I immediately contacted them and they told me that somehow the debit order was activated in June 2012 and that they had to calculate the amount owing to me and that they would reimburse me the total they owed,” he said.
“This would take between seven and 21 working days, I was told.”
In March he called the company again and was told he was owed more than R2 000 and that he’d be refunded “soon”.
Then the run-around began. He tried to engage people in management about why the debit order was reactivated, and why he wasn’t getting his promised refund, but kept being referred to customer services. Tired of getting no answers and no refund, Siems contacted Consumer Watch last month.
I took up his case with Platinum. Responding, client care manager Elma Malan said the company “underwent an important system upgrade” last June, “and an error occurred as our IT department was transferring data. This unintentionally reinstated approximately 62 dormant accounts.”
Then came the interesting part.
“We received a call from Mr Siems again on February 15, disputing such debit order deductions, and we terminated the account on March 19. A refund amount of R2 298.60 was calculated and captured on April 22.”
He was finally refunded in mid-May.
In all, it took 11 months from the time the rogue debits started for Siems to get his money back.
Malan added: “The systems gremlin has been detected and rectified and we have refunded all clients erroneously billed. Refund payments usually take between seven to 21 working days from the date of capture and may be further delayed due to payments being made in batches.”
Consumer complaints website HelloPeter.com has pages of complaints from others who were debited from last June. The complaints date back to July.
So the company was clearly aware of the “system error” back then. That people like Siems were still being debited for months afterwards, and being made to wait many more months for a refund, is, well, you fill in the word.
Refunds of money illegally taken should not take months. All 62 people should have been notified and refunded within weeks of the error coming to light.
And then there’s the shocking lack of communication.
The first Siems heard of an IT gremlin was when I took up the case and got a response from Malan.
In a follow-up e-mail to Malan, I wrote: “Frankly, this ‘error’ should never have happened, and when it did, Platinum should have moved heaven and earth to refund people’s money within the week. We live in a computerised age, which is how the company managed to raid these people’s accounts, with no authority, instantly. But when it comes to giving it back, your victims are made to wait months.”
I put the word “error” in quotation marks, as that is the word Malan chose to use in her initial response.
Malan responded: “In an ideal world, errors would not happen, but alas, they sometimes do in our real world.
“We therefore take exception to your use of the word ‘error’ (given a distasteful innuendo by being in inverted commas) as well as the word ‘victims’ – for what amounts to an innocent technical error on our part.”
No word on why it took so many months to fix that “innocent technical error”.
Whatever the cause, Siems and the other 61 were indeed victims of an injustice, both in having their accounts depleted unjustifiably, and in having to wait so long to get their money back.
Many also incurred bank charges as a result of there being insufficient funds to meet the unexpected, unauthorised debit orders. - The Pretoria News