2,361.52 reasons to be pissed.
Feb 25th, 2008 by B.
We pay 80€ a year for the privilege of owning a mastercard with a balance that’s paid in full at the end of each month via direct-deduction from our bank account. It’s like a glorified debit card by American standards, but very necessary for reserving airline tickets, hotel rooms, or buying things on the internet when überweisung (bank transfer) isn’t an accepted mode of payment. This (bank acct. & credit card) was set up for us when we first moved here - probably the crappiest package Deutsche Bank has to offer, but we didn’t know any better at the time.
We’ve done a lot of online ordering… mostly überweisung, sometimes mastercard… over the past 2 years, so we just sucked it up & paid the fees - having been relatively happy with the ease of everything. Right up until this past Saturday, that is, when I opened our invoice for the past month and found 2361.52 in charges to our mastercard that we hadn’t made.
Naturally this had to happen on a weekend when there’s virtually nothing we could do. Still we called mastercard to have them cancel the card… and they wouldn’t. Apparently we aren’t signed up for online banking or some shit like that, so they said they couldn’t help us. After speaking to 3 other people, we finally got them to put a hold on the card until today because our bank has to be the one to cancel it. Gee, thanks. We also asked why the account hadn’t been flagged for suspicious activity. I mean, in the two years we’ve had the card we’ve never charged over 2 grand in a week. Not to mention that a lot of this was happening while we were in Vienna. The statement clearly shows charges from the hotel we stayed at in Vienna, while at the same time showing charges to:
Barcelona Vinos for: 461,38 & 359,24
Tic Tac Mania, Igualada for: 314,00 / 287,50 /314,00
Adolfo Dominguez, San Cibrao for: 242,00 / 344,00
Renfe 001, Madrid for: 39,40
For a grand total: 2361,52 euro
No one found it suspicious that we were staying in a hotel in Austria while ordering massive amounts of wine, expensive watches and clothes online for delivery to Spain.. all with a home address in Germany?? What the hell does it take to flag an account for suspicious activity these days? Because had they called/emailed/mailed us, we might have been able to head this off before the charges cleared and some stupid cocksucker got away with 2+ grand of merchandise on our tab.
And Deutsche Bank? Complete assholes. We’ve been trying to speak to someone since 9:00 this morning and have gotten nothing but the runaround. The English-speaking “account specialist” who helped set up our account is in the office but apparently too busy to return our calls. We’ve gone through 5 or 6 others who keep passing us around while doing absolutely nothing. Meanwhile the card still isn’t canceled and any second now all 2,361.52 will be sucked out of our bank account (and something tells me once the money’s gone, getting it back will be twice as hard & take three times as long).
Jim’s heading to the bank now to try & resolve this, but based on how it goes I might be asking opinions on which bank we should switch to. And if this has to roll over to tomorrow… I will personally show up at Deutsche Bank, and I’m not nearly as nice or pleasant to deal with as Jim is.
And this doesn’t even scratch the surface when it comes to how someone managed to get their hands on our account information…
On this day..
- And the Oscar goes to... - 2007
- Back, happy, tired. - 2007
- byok - 2006
So sorry to hear this, B and Jim! I have had only one deal for the bank to get the molney back and it was fairly easy, with the right documentation. I bank at Dresdener. Not to say …. it was NOT a credit card deal.
Recently an EXPAT French gal transferred her entire French account to Germany … quite a lot actually. Closed a business et. al. She was with Deutsche Bank. For 8 months the money never arrived …. and she, basically devoid of Deutsch but good enough English went often and got louder and louder and no one seemed to know where the money was. In final desperation, she went to a lawyer. AND with one phone call, she said, it was in her account in a few hours. Sadly, her lawyer said, it was fraud. DO you have any idea how your card got out? But happens in the States. Teacher friend had well over your amount deducted from her account …. medical textbooks and equipement ordered and mailed to TURKEY. AND she was the ultimate loser. By the time it was resolved with Amazon (the play it was ordered from) her credit rating was 0. Best of luck, lady! (no spell check, alas!
Oh boy…
I think you are in a worse position than I was when my bank froze my account and didn’t send me a credit card for four weeks because their database was stolen.
tqe / Adam’s last blog post..Another Level: Space!
I HATE this stuff! They go along all la-dee-da and wonder why you’re so freaked out… Grrrrrr! Here’s hoping for a quick resolution!
Carol
Carol Snider’s last blog post..Big Day
I bank with Sparkasse. Haven’t had any major problems, but it is pretty rare to find somebody who can speak English. My wallet was stolen once and I was able to quickly cancel my cards and numbers and stuff.
Although once with no warning my bank card was cut off, and then had to call to find out there was some potential security breach and I had to wait a couple weeks for a new one.
A friend of mine is getting dicked around by Deutsche Bank here with some charges that should not be there. He keeps calling and going and it seems the one guy that can deal with it is never there and can’t return calls.
All this stuff scares me. It seems not to be particular to DB but rather kind of Germany in particular. I don’t feel like going through all my bills looking for errors and charges that should not be there, especially when they are all in technical German!
But I get the feeling that if somebody here is screwing you over (bank, landlord, utilities), the best you can do is catch them at it and the most they have to do is give you what you’re owed. So it seems like there is no incentive for them NOT to try, especially with foreigners!! arg.
I just want to know what Tic Tac Mania is.
Oh, B - what a horror story! I always thought that if you could prove fraud on your card, your bank is on the hook for the dough, not you. Good luck.
I have a Lufthansa Mastercard Miles & More Gold card - business plan. I pay 95 a year - last time I checked - and I only got it because of this deal: they pay for the insurance on car rentals. If you book a rental car through this card, you only have to get the basic insurance. The card insures you for damage, theft etc with - I think - a 300 euro deductable. Saves way more than 95 euros on just one one-week rental per year.
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Wow, that sucks…It’s pretty easy to cancel a card this side of the Atlantic, one phone call will do it. Sometimes they even cancel it if you don’t phone which kind of sucks when your abroad though. You will get your money back if they take it out of your account, that’s a given, don’t worry…ciao
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Sounds like someone in Vienna is running a scam.
I hope you are able to head of the bank autopay, but being branded with the MC logo should limit you liability against fraud.
The merchants and MC will have to sort it out amongst themselves.
Good luck !
Oh B, that totally sucks! I’m being super careful while I’m away, but still, that freaks me right out! There’s probably no chance in catching the cock sucker who did this, but if they did catch them, they should give them to you personally to punish! Good luck resolving it anyway!
Oh geez! Did you read Dixie Peach’s post about this very same thing? She’s in Germany and just got news of stuff being charged to her card in the U.S. I wonder if it’s the same credit card you guys have?
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I had the same thing happen to me this weekend but you got it much, much, much worse!! You can read my tale here : http://dixiepeach.blogspot.com/2008/02/hyphenated-theft.html
And you’ll see that I had a MUCH different outcome. We bank with Sparkasse and our personal banker (and I’ll admit that we likely have a personal banker because we have a bunch of investments with them plus my husband and his family have had an account with them for eons - I don’t know if everyone gets a personal banker) called us to check about an 85 cent charge that looked weird! 85 cents! Sparkasse also uses a company called PlusCard to oversee these accounts for fraud. They’re the ones who first called our banker and notified him plus they wrote us a letter to tell us about the online casino charges. They were friendly, professional and volunteered to cancel our MasterCard and have a new one reissued. And they denied the charges. We were given first class treatment all the way.
I’d get my money out of Deutsche Bank so fast it would make their heads spin. How dare they treat you like that! And not cancel your card? There’s no excuse for that!!
Dixie’s last blog post..Hyphenated Theft
B!
This is terrible!! I’m with Dixie Peach-get your money the heck out of Deutsche Bank. I’d say call the newspaper and get them involved, but don’t know if Germans use their media outlets the way Americans do when something smells like a rat!
I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a positive outcome…good luck!
Thanks guys. I feel sure we’ll get the €€ back, it’s just a matter of how stressful it’ll be in the meantime. Ugh.
We also hate the banking system here in DE for many reasons. But at least at citibank we can bank online in English, cancel cards and call 24 hrs a day to deny charges done to our account. If you have any direct deposit here in Germany the account will be free, you can use the credit card at any atm, and you get an EC card and the credit card gets the 40E charge refunded after you bcharge approx 2500 for the year.I hope this gets cleared up quickly and I do think you should think of changing banks!
Wow, citibank sounds like the way to go… once we’ve got this mess cleared up I might have to switch to them.