A city-based credit card holder has recently won Rs 25,000 compensation from ICICI Bank Credit Cards for wrongly billing him. The bank has also been told to pay Rs 2000 to him towards legal cost. The bank charged to the account of P Chandrashekara Rao of PVN Colony in Malkajgiri an amount of Rs 25,866.28 for transactions not done by him. With the bank refusing to accept its mistake, Rao petitioned the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum-III. After hearing his arguments and verifying records, the forum on May 16 directed the credit card company to pay him Rs 25,000 as compensation along with Rs 2,000 as costs. Chandrasekhara was in for a shock when he received an ICICI Bank statement on April 28, 2007 with three transactions. One for Rs 20,242.17 that was spent on google.com, Rs 2,824 paid to Spicejet Ltd, Gurgaon, and the third for Rs 6633.85 in the name of Hostrocket. “I wrote a letter on May 7, 2007, to the manager of the ICICI Credit Cards division in Mumbai drawing his attention to the misuse of my card. I also lodged a complaint with the call centre executive on May 8, 2007, and accordingly, he blocked the card,” Rao told ‘TOI’. “But the bank manager in Mumbai did not respond,” he said. As the bank authorities never responded to the notices issued by P Satyanarayana, incharge, Alternative Consumer Disputes Redressal Cell, Civil Supplies Bhavan, Somajiguda, Chandrashekara’s complaint was forwarded to the consumer forum. After investigation, the president of the forum said, “We perused the documents and found that the bank wrongfully debited to the complainant’s credit card account due to misuse of the credit card. On being notified, the defendant (bank) is obliged to provide details clarifying the issues to the complainant. As the bank failed in its duty as a service provider, the complainant was subject to mental agony and anxiety due to the false transaction that was made in his account,” the judgment said.
Sunil Mungara TNN
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