Absa double debits clients

Last week Absa customers took to Hello Peter to complain about double debits on their accounts. On 9 and 10 August, some customers experienced an issue where transactions were being deducted twice from their debit or credit cards. In some instances this left customers out of pocket.

An overall sentiment of dissatisfaction with the way Absa handled the situation was expressed by customers. Complaints included the bank’s slow response time to addressing the problem, the delay in money being reimbursed to customers, and the bank’s staff members being unable to assist.

One customer wrote on Hello Peter: “When I swiped my card at an outlet this week, I was charged twice for one transaction now my account has a shortage of money that was not supposed to be deducted. I went to a branch where I was told that I have to wait for two days...this is frustrating as an amount of R1300 was erroneously deducted from my account and they can't see that on the statement.”

In a similar complaint logged of 11 August, another customer wrote: “I filled up at a petrol station on Wednesday 10th August 2016 for R400 and was charged twice. I have sent an email to the bank notifying them of this and have received no reply. This is disgusting as I am now stuck. The money that is taken in my account was my last bit of cash before my pay date next week Monday. What am I expected to do now?”

When Justmoney contacted Absa for comment, a spokesperson responded: “Absa would like to apologise to our customers following a communication network failure which impacted certain credit, debit and prepaid transactions at Point of Sale (POS) and ATM’s on 9 and 10 August. The issue has now been resolved, and we are urgently attending to remediating for the affected customers.  Contact is being made with all impacted customers who can also contact us on 08600 08600 for assistance.”

Absa was unable to comment on how many people were affected or how it became aware of the issue of double deductions.

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