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Topics: News, World News, Money
Kit Roberts
Topics: News, World News, Money
Checking one's bank balance can be a nerve-wracking affair at time, but one woman in Malaysia has a huge surprise when she checked hers.
That could of course go one of two ways, and in this case it was that somehow her balance was showing as much higher than she expected.
Some $86 million higher, in fact.
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But Hafidzah Abdullah was not as delighted as you might expect by this turn of events, as there was a problem.
The problem was that Hafidzah was not actually able to access the money in the account. It could have been a billion dollars and it wouldn't have made any difference.
The bank was Maybank, Malaysia's fourth-largest lender by assets, and Hafidzah was thoroughly unimpressed with being unable to access the funds in her account.
She contacted the bank on November 29 with a scathing post in which she called her experience of banking with the firm 'memorable'. Ouch.
She wrote: “Dear Maybank, I appreciate your making my banking experience memorable.”
Hafidzah went on to detail how she had experienced a number of glitches in her account, and that it had become a recurring issue for her.
She called the experience 'a comedy of errors that nobody finds funny', and had to either visit in branch or face a long wait on the phone to be able to access her account.
Hafidzah continued: “They say money can’t buy happiness, but Maybank knows how to buy frustration.”
And Hafidzah, who co-founded a human resources company, was not alone in her frustration at Maybank as others weighed in with their own comments.
One posted: “Am wondering what’s wrong with banks in Malaysia."
There were also many other people who chimed in with joking congratulations at her enormous 'windfall', but who were really expressing their disappointment with the bank.
Amid the debacle, Maybank's head of group customer experience management, Shaikh Munir Ahmad, reached out to Hafidzah on social media to ask how he could help.
He later confirmed that the bank had dealt with the issue, and that Hafidzah was now able to access her account.
Maybank confirmed on Friday that the matter had been resolved.
In Malaysia the average household income is around $22,000 per year.
A spokesperson for Maybank said in a statement: “It was not a system-wide issue and the customer account was not compromised."