I had a curious experience with Westpac a few years ago. Details are not important but Westpac had a Very Badly Implemented Promotion for their card holders. I am atop bad things, worry about security, confirm domains and so on, and clicked through but eventually a suspicion was raised. I immediately rang Westpac to confirm if it was indeed their promotion.
The phone agent immediately advised I had been phished, lectured, cancelled my card and it took a business week to receive a new card. Reality eventuated that it was a Westpac promotion and there was nothing wrong except some over-employed IT staff and their manager.
Bottom line is their customer protection training always ended up with ‘it must be fraud’ so they could hear nothing about their own promotional disaster or my attempt to educate them on technicalities of why the site was in Westpac’s domain so would they check, and it all fell on deaf ears. Their hollow apology in not knowing about their own promotions and thus impacting their customer was couched in a ‘your security is important to us’. My inconvenience resulted in better training and contributed to a change in their systems.
Sometimes an incorrect debit has other reasons than simple fraud. I bought something from an online merchant once, a few years ago and out of the blue there was a recent $50 charge from them. I rang Westpac, flagged it in online banking, and it was a once off that got handled. The reason was claimed to be a new accounting system at the merchant, that incorrectly picked up some historical transactions. If it or another bogus debit occurred I would have stopped the card.
My point is that one needs to watch for fraud and report anything suspicious, but to also keep perspective – it might be an innocent although irritating problem, or it could be worrisome.
