Seraph Chronicles

Credit card woes

I’m sure most people nowadays have at least one credit card. Credit cards are good and bad, it can mislead you to overspend, but then again they can come in handy when you run out of notes and for that occasional online transaction. Applying for one is fairly easy nowadays too, now I’m not too into credit cards so I’m not that sure how different each bank’s cards are, but one bank in particular has presented itself to me as the most idiotic and lousy out of all the banks I’ve used before. It’s a big name, well established, international and all, and I’m sure some of you will disagree with me when I mention the name, brace yourselves, this bank is none other than Standard Chartered.

Applying for the card was a breeze, agent fills up the form for you, wait few weeks and you receive your card. Now the frustration comes after receiving the card, and luckily I did not use it that many times either. After the first month of using the card, you’d expect the bank statement to arrive and you’d have to go settle it, but nooo….. no statement the first month, so OK I’ll just wait, maybe it was delayed or something, then what I get is a call from Standard Chartered, telling me my payment is overdue, and so I tell them that I did not receive the statement and whether they could resend it, and guess what, they said statements are only sent once a month so you’ll have to wait for next month. So I waited, second month, no statement, phone call comes, yada yada yada, third month still no statement, cycle starts again, and then their debt collector’s department called and threaten me that if I do not pay they will take legal action against me, and this coming from the people who can’t even get a statement sent properly to their customers. Oh what I forgot to mention was, apparently they had my address wrong in their system, and I had to bring it up to their customer service to check whether my address was right, which raises the question of how did I get the card in the first place if they had my address wrong all the time? No thanks for finding their fault for them, instead they question me why I did not make sure my address was filled up correctly? WTF! How many times have I told you I did not receive any statement, you don’t even think whether my address was inserted correctly or not, I have to find the fault for you and now you are blaming me for it again? What’s more they even have the nerve to say that I don’t even bother to call up and ask after so many months not receiving the statement? Why should I call when your staff has already harassed me for so many times and I’ve asked them to send it again time after time, instead, why doesn’t the bank bother to provide their services properly? Sending a statement is that hard even after obtaining the right address? Either there’s some conspiracy going on or they’re just plain imbeciles.

Fed up I cancelled the card and asked them to resend the statement again, and guess what, it still does not arrive!! I had to go to the bank itself to ask for the statement where it was not so straight forward as “Can you print the statement for me?”, I had to ask an officer there to do it, and instead of printing it for me, she went and called customer service for me again? I’ve spoken to your people over the phone for so many times I don’t even bother to count, which I told her there’s no point, but still stubborn and wanting to make the call, and so I wasted my time on the phone again, which after she finally decided to help me print it out, which was quite a long wait again.

Now that’s not the end of it yet, the amount of the transactions for my webhost was higher than what I had paid for, and yes I’ve asked whether there are any extra charges for online payment and there aren’t, even the bank does not charge extra for online transactions, so where’s the extra amount coming from? No idea, so I filed a dispute about the extra charges and settled the balance that I should pay. Now after nearly a month I’m getting harassed by them again, in fact just today, when I asked what’s going on with the extra charges, all I got was we’re still investigating it, and if it’s found that I’m the one liable for the charges I’ll need to pay and be charged RM20 processing fees for their investigation 0_o” . Now I’m wondering what will happen next.

All in all, I’ve never met a bank with such lousy service, threats of legal action when you can’t even receive your monthly statement. Bad service, slow service, bad attitude, incompetent handling of issues, I never did receive any statement through normal means, except after canceling the card, only did I receive the statement for the mysterious extra charges. Yes very fine work Standard Charted, and I’m wondering why the STANDARD is in the name in the first place. No hard feelings to those who find their services good, and to those who are doing a good job at the bank itself, perhaps it’s just my one of a kind case or I’m just unlucky enough to get caught up in someone’s mistakes at work. If you do have a good experience with them then by all means continue on, as for me, I’m looking elsewhere for my banking and credit card needs.