Why ING Sucks
Fiona is a young high school maths teacher who has a lot on her mind.
She’s knee deep in planning her wedding, so her head is full with nuptial numbers:
The guest list, her wedding dress, flowers, bridesmaid dresses … bridesmaids.
One afternoon recently her phone rang.
It was a private number.
As with most people, Fiona’s reflex was to ignore it and let it go to voicemail, but then she remembered she was expecting a call from a supplier about the wedding, so she answered.
Turns out it was Telstra.
“The Telstra rep seemed to know all my details, and they ran me through the privacy stuff. Then they told me that my internet server had been compromised and that I was vulnerable to hackers”, she told me.
Fiona was a little suspicious … but the rep directed her to a Telstra website and asked her to put in her IP address. Sure enough it showed that she had in fact been hacked.
“O.M.G!”
From there, she was directed to open her emails, and then her ING banking app.
The Telstra employee (who had given Fiona her Telstra employee ID for verification purposes) asked her to write down a long series of numbers that she would need to give to the technician that would be visiting her house the next day and reset her internet.
While Fiona was busy writing down numbers, her fiancé arrived home from work and went to the study to do some banking. A few moments later he stormed out and to the lounge room and waved his ING app in her face.
The $20,000 they’d saved up in their ING account to pay for their wedding?
Gone.
Fiona had in fact been talking to a scammer all this time.
“Please make me look silly to your readers,” Fiona pleaded as she told me her story. “Because I am silly. I thought that these scams only happened to Boomers!”
Yet here’s what got my goat:
The scammers hit her account every 30 seconds, each time taking random amounts:
$546, $990, $7.50, $1,000, $99.
And they kept smashing the account until all $20,000 was drained.
Yet get this: the account name the money was going to was spelt “Drothy”.
OH COME ON!
We’re not in Kansas anymore, ING!
Grab the Tin Man and Toto and go bite these buggers!
Seriously, you’d think that Australia’s fifth largest bank – which trousered $549 million in profits after tax last year – would have tipped even just a little bit of that dough into having the most basic banking safety features … like, say, a trigger that detects when a customer is potentially getting scammed and puts a temporary lock on the account?
Nope.
Yet it gets worse.
After a lot of back and forth and tears from Fiona, ING agreed to pay her half the money back.
Half?
That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Either ING believes it’s not their problem, in which case they would tell her (politely) to go jump. Or they admit they should have detected the fraud and pay the money back.
So which is it?
You can’t get half up the duff, Drothy!
In fact, ING’s behaviour is depressingly very bank-like:
“When customers get scammed, it’s a lottery if they get reimbursed by their bank. Sometimes it’s 50%, sometimes it’s 75%, sometimes we find they get nothing”, says Gerard Brody from the Consumer Action Law Centre.
ING’s logo is a lion, which is kind of apt.
In The Wizard of Oz the cowardly lion is given a dish of courage to drink, which instantly transforms him and allows him to protect Dorothy.
Time to lick the bowl, ING.
You’re Australia’s most recommended bank. Start acting like it.
And if, dear reader, you’re thinking “There’s no way I would have fallen for a Telstra scam”, then you really need to read the following question and see how you would have fared …
Tread Your Own Path!