This guy went from having a million SEK to million SEK in debt: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/marko-ligger-1-3-miljoner-minus-pa-kontot-sanslost
Sometimes shit just happens. Sometimes it's blind ignorance and an accident waiting to happen, sometimes it's a bad code review process. Seems to me it's seldom really the fault of the person making the commit.
I put a simple assertion in as a precondition check and this fired over 20,000 times within an hour of deploying it leading to several months of fixes, horrible discoveries and cheques written.
https://www.thelocal.se/20220429/swedish-bank-it-fault-puts-...
Though I don't think people would be advertising if they benefited in that way so harder to measure.
Some long-standing accounts received very large cheques (it was the 90s, so yes, cheques).
The FI gave the customers the choice to either return the cheques or have future interest payments withheld. Surprisingly the vast majority simply returned the cheques.
We had to write additional code to clawback the interest on the other accounts. I doubt if the FI would have had any recourse if people had just closed their accounts and kept the cheque but to the best of my knowledge nobody did.
Current balance: -1,000,000.
Debit: Spent money at Koenigsegg (a Swedish car brand), new balance: -1 billion.
Patch: flip - to +: new balance: 1 billion
People tried buying things and had their purchases denied.
In Austria I only see cash being exchanged at the supermarket and when I see someone paying by card or, God forbid, phone or watch, it's most likely a foreigner form another country where cash payments are not popular rather than a local who went cashless.
Here's an example reporting on an IT failure at a British bank: https://home.barclays/content/dam/home-barclays/documents/ci...
(Most recently laundering Russian oligarch money iirc)
Ordinary consumers don't give a damn about shady dealings of their banks, mostly because unlike phone numbers bank account numbers are not portable. Yes there exist regulations that banks have to assist with direct debit and automated order migration, but it's nevertheless a hassle to switch banks.
[1] https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen-verbrauche...
This paragraph probably can be contested, if done in advance of signing the agreement, but if every other bank you approach have such a condition (to be fair, the only other bank I approached was SEB, also Scandinavian bank) spending time on arguing about trivialities while selling my soul to get an even worse rate did not seem like a worthwhile pursuit.
I don't think any banks here allow you just to have a mortgage agreement without an account at them- they deduct the monthly payment automatically. It might be possible with other types of loans, but I don't think it can be done with mortgages.
If you try to find a bank that isn't filled with criminal minds, you will never find one.
Now it can be claimed that cheap != low quality and there are certainly some exceptions out there, but generally you get what you par for.
The one time I had to do some non-standard stuff they were pretty slow and a little disorganised, but it still seemed better than the UK banks I've used previously.
The being said, living in Sweden before you get your digital ID set up and everything sorted out in all the right databases seems to be a massive pain. All my non-Swedish colleagues at work have bureaucratic horror stories of their first months in the country.
Even if you have cash, which most people don't, it's hard to spend. Grocery stores still take it so it would actually be useful in this situation, but other than grocery stores I struggle to think of any places in my city that accept cash. Maybe some bigger outlets do, not sure, but restaurants, cafes, takeaway places, small specialty stores and the like certainly do not take cash.
Denmark has taken measures to require most businesses to accept cash, but Sweden doesn't seem to have done that. I keep ~1000DKK at home for emergencies, but I haven't purchased anything with cash for... um... a long time. Perhaps once in the last year.
That's not clear from the text or video.
I live in Malmo, not an expensive or high paying city; I have at one point had more than a million SEK in my bank (which is equivalent to about 100,000 USD), I was 27 at the time.
Certainly not impossible, no reason to be skeptical.