Kotak Mahindra Bank — Unauthorized debit of account!

This is with regard to the recent remittance I received in my Kotak Savings Account on August 17th for Rs 6750.72.

While the remittance was sent and (apparently) received fine, I received a huge shock when my balance was showing as Rs 3204.64 as opposed to what it should i.e. the remittance amount above.

I contacted Kotak instantly regarding this both on Twitter and also by sending them an email through Internet Banking.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to get any conclusive answer or resolution. On Twitter, they told me “there is a hold on my account due to declined ATM/POS charges”, however, when I asked them to send me an actual summary of how many and what charges were declined, they never did so and stopped replying to me.

Via Internet banking, they keep copying and pasting the same thing to me repeatedly i.e. “declined ATM/POS”, but they don’t tell me WHAT exact charges these are, when they are made, and when they were declined.

There were a FEW declined POS/ATM transactions, yes, and they claim they charged me Rs 25 for these per transaction, however, I’ve checked my account – and those charges have ALREADY been debited, so there is no reason to put another “hold on the account”.

Further, the disputed amount ie. Rs 3546 is too large. There cannot be that many declined transactions i.e. at Rs 25 charged per transaction, that comes to almost 140 or so declined transactions which is simply not possible.

I believe this is an underhand way of “holding customer’s money” for a while so the bank can earn interest on it – I’ve asked Kotak to give me a STATEMENT showing EXACTLY how many transactions were declined, but they are not doing so. Neither are that many declined transactions showing in Internet Banking – and the ones that are, they’ve already charged me not Rs 25 – but Rs 29 + GST per transaction on those, which is also something they never told me i.e. Rs 25 should not be Rs 31!

Kindly check and please get the “hold” released and the funds released to me at the earliest, as this sort of “predatory” behavior by these Private Sector Banks is simply, to put it in one word – UNACCEPTABLE – not to mention their customer service who are more than willing to tweet inanities all day, but given any real issue to solve, they never solve it.

Please let me know at the earliest. If you need more info on this, please do let me know, and I will be more than glad to share anything needed.

The last time I raised this complaint, I was unable to proceed past the initial part of the complaint process because the RBI CMS was not working OK.

However, a few days later I was able to successfully raise this complaint with them, but on both occasions, they closed the complaint saying "you did not give the bank time to respond".

Yet, I did - and the RBI's own policies state that if the customer is unhappy with the response given by the bank, they can approach the Ombudsman, which I did, but in this case, no use.

I'd appreciate it if someone here could provide more light on the situation and help me get my money back - as it is most disconcerting that banks are doing this to their customers.

Thank you!

Best
Rahul Mookerjee

P.S. - Their securities is another scam - basically, I got an email from them today stating "I bought shares from them" - except I never did, I've never even USED their platform for that.

I will open a separate thread regarding that.