Hacker News Reader

Comment by hgomersall | Hacker News Reader

I had money disappear from my HSBC account. As in, the double entries didn't match by a small amount (it was a payment between two of my accounts that didn't match up, which I couldn't trivially reconcile in the books). I pursued this for a while but they never even properly acknowledged it let alone fix it.

I had my unfounded suspicion it was some internal subtle theft going on, but incompetence is probably a better explanation.

View on HN

If you live in a developed country it should be sufficient to ask them to account for it with a note that a formal complaint will be sent to relevant authorities if nor dealt with in timely manner.

That stuff like this is in order is the foundation of kapital societies and is taken quite seriously.

You'd think so wouldn't you? But alas, the effort required to solve this was at least more than I was willing to make.

If in the US, the CFPB would handle this for you.

Funnily enough, that's an agency Musk wants to gut: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/27/congress/de...

I had a similar situation with Santander many years ago: it was a small amount and happened when I was closing my account, bank manager couldn't explain it and escalating the problem was a pain - especially because I was about to move to another country and had more urgent things to do.

I wonder how common issues like these are...

I think it's quite common, it's just that people do not notice these things.

I also had it happen one time, the bank eventually figured it out and fixed some error on their part.

You're likely correct it was theft. I was told by a CTO there that topping up accounts with bank money where it has been hacked away was daily routine and cheaper than fixing the systems. Incompetence would not manifest on routine operations like this.

> I had my unfounded suspicion it was some internal subtle theft going on

Had you watched Office Space recently?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com