A female customer in Hanoi is preparing to sue Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for transferring VND4 billion (USD190,400) from her account without her authorisation.

Tran Thi Thanh Phuc said that she had hired lawyers to help her to take the case to court after having to wait eight months for the bank to move on the issue.

"Our family has been suffering from both financial and emotional pain during the eight-month period. The bank transferred USD190,400 from my account to a stranger incorrectly. I have worked with the bank representatives many times and the bank itself admitted that the transaction was unexpected to them and was partially due to their staff’s weakness and mistakes,” Phuc said.

The image of the man who brought an apparently forged withdrawal document to the SCB branch recorded by the bank’s camera

Phuc has also lodged a petition to the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to ask for an investigation into whether SCB violated transaction regulations on her case or not.

According to deputy chief inspector of the SBV Pham Huyen Anh, the case is a civil dispute between her and SCB. 

The bank has sent her petition to SCB for the answers. If she disagreed with SCB’s answers, she can bring the case to the Dong Da District People’s Court.

Phuc opened a VND4.2 billion account at SCB’s branch in Dong Da Street. On November 19, 2015, when wanting to make a withdrawal, she was shocked to know that she had lost VND4 billion from her account.

The bank said to her that on October 10, 2015, a man brought the SCB branch a payment order with her signature. Under the payment order, the money was sent to a person named Le Thu Ha. Before the VND4-billion transaction, a bank staff member verified her account information.

However, according to Phuc, in this case, the bank violated the transaction regulation as transferring the money from her account with only the order payment, but not her authorisation paper.

The order payment with Phuc's signature

She said that had not signed any payment order and also had not received any call from the bank for the transaction, Phuc added, noting that the signature was fake.

Phuc remembered that on the day of the transaction was made, she was ill and only her friend named Nguyen Thi Thanh Hang took care of her those days. She suspects that Hang might have taken her mobile phone to answer the banking staff’s questions for the account. Phuc has asked the Hanoi police to investigate Hang.

Banks face ‘confidence crisis’

Vietnamese commercial banks have been facing a ‘confidence crisis’ following a series of customer complaints about losses from their accounts.

In July 2015, Tran Thi Thanh Xuan, Director of Ba Huan Investment & Development Company, headquartered in HCM City, detected that she had lost VND26 billion from its account at VP Bank. 

However, VP Bank insisted that that the amount of money lost was VND11.3 billion. To date, the dispute between the client and VP Bank has not been settled.

In August this year, Hoang Thi Na Huong, a client of Vietcombank, one of the largest commercial banks, complained that she lost VND500 million from her account.

After Huong, other clients of Vietcombank complained that they lost from several millions to tens of millions of dong.

Dtinews