I did something stupid in December last year.
When I returned from Finland, I knew I had chalked up a credit card bill.
I had been cancelling credit cards one by one as I really seldom use them and I don't want to be charged (and paying) annual fees without knowing it.
Before I went overseas, I found a Standard Chartered credit card sitting in my drawer.
I had signed up for it as the salesguy told me that it would give me 1.5% cashback on whatever I spent on, subject to a limit of a certain amount of cashback per month. Two years' worth of annual fees would be waived. Even if I was charged later on, I could always call up to get them waived.
I was not an active user of it so I decided to try it out overseas.
I used it to buy a few LV bags so I knew I had chalked up close to $10k on it.
When I returned to Singapore, I checked my credit card bill the next day and the date stated on the screen was that very day. I knew usually that wasn't possible but I didn't want to delay my payment so I pressed a few buttons and tried paying for it.
I was used to seeing the online bank having our savings account as the default 'Pay from' account so I did not think much of it when it had an additional page popping up, asking me to confirm or acknowledge. I just tapped 'yes' and the payment went through.
Then I saw that the sum of money in my savings account was not paid out. Instead another $9K+ came in!
I panicked. I had done a cash advance on my credit card instead!
I asked for help on the app immediately asking if I could reverse the transaction. The reply was that it could not be reversed before the transaction went through.
I waited till the next day when it went through before I reversed the payment. However, I also realised that I was charged $780 fee for the cash advance!
I made two calls to the CSOs who 'assured' me that the fee could not be cancelled but they would help to appeal for the waiver anyway.
True enough. I received two smses stating that the appeals were not successful.
Like many times I had been cheated of my money, I was close to giving up. But I had such confidence in the Singapore banks system that I decided to seek out all possible avenues before giving up.
I looked up similar cases like mine and found someone on Reddit who did the same thing and felt the same way as I did, that it was a trap waiting for us to walk in. The user said that he didn't manage to get a waiver but the amount was small ie. $100+ so it was not that big a deal.
I was so desperate I wrote in to the bank via the bank app. A day later, I wrote in to FIDReC, MAS and the Minister of Finance who is also our Prime Minister to complain about the misleading bank app interface which led to my mistake. I also raised doubts about integrity of the system and appealed for the money to be returned to me.
Then I received a call from the Complaint Unit of the bank who largely assured me that I should get a waiver as it was a mistake and I had only one waiver done a year ago (which I don't remember at all).
Subsequently, I received an sms which was backdated to the time two hours before the guy called me to say that my appeal was unsuccessful again!
Then someone pmed me on a social media platform that as a bank manager, he had helped a few clients waived such fees before and advised me to go down to a branch personally to speak to a branch manager.
I rushed down to the nearest branch to me which was at NEX. The service manager at the reception counter checked for me and found that my appeal was still in progress. She said that she was unable to raise another appeal until this had gone through but promised to send an email to check on the status.
That afternoon, I received an email stating that my appeal was successful.
All these ding-dongs happened within a week. Imagine the turmoil I went through over this sum of money.
When the refund was completed, I immediately called in to cancel all my SC accounts. I had posted my experience on a social media platform and it received 70k views within one or two days (I just checked and it's 140k views now). Many people commented and shared their awful experiences with SC. It was getting discouraging as almost everybody said that they didn't get a waiver for whatever fee they had with SC.
I don't want to take any chance with SC again.
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