On December 27, 2016, I transferred Dh1,000 online to a beneficiary, as a credit card payment. I received a message that the transaction was successful and the transfer charges were debited, along with Dh1,000 as well.

On January 3, 2017, I received a notification with regards to the credit card — it said I had received a fine of Dh550 for non-payment. When I checked with the institution, they said that they hadn’t received the amount.

I sent an email to Sharjah Islamic Bank (SIB) to ask where the amount I paid was, since I didn’t receive any returns to my account. After two days, they returned Dh1,000, saying that the card number was not correct. My first question is — why did they verify the beneficiary earlier, if the card number was incorrect?

My second question is — if somehow I agree that the card number was not correct, why can’t they return my money on the same day or the next? Why did they keep the money with them without informing me, which then led to my late penalty fee?

I have already exchanged many emails with the bank and I have raised a complaint with their complaints department, and they said it would take four working days to revert to me. Despite calling them again and again, I have not received any response from them.

Despite many follow-ups and after raising complaints, they have refused to give me my money back.

From Ms Iffat Tahir

Dubai

The management of Sharjah Islamic Bank responds:

Please be advised that the customer’s complaint is completely unfounded. The reason her credit card payment was returned by the other bank was due to the fact that the customer herself selected the incorrect bank to make a payment with her credit card, which does not belong to the bank she chose. Please note that this payment was done by the customer over our online banking platform, which transfers payments directly to other banks, without any manual processing. We would like to add here that on the same date, the customer made multiple transfers to other financial institutions as well, which were processed without any issue.

Further, with reference to the validation of a credit card, no bank is able to validate the correctness of an account or card number for other financial institutions and it is the customer’s responsibility to provide correct information.

Moreover, the customer claim that we have not contacted her is also unfounded, as the bank has constantly been in touch with her and our staff has been trying to support and help the customer.

Ms Tahir responds:

My concern is that in the case of the address being incorrect, why did they accept it as a beneficiary? Secondly, if it was incorrect, why did they not return the funds within one to two days? Why did they keep it for themselves for eight days? Only when I enquired about it, did they return the amount.

If they had returned it to my account within one to two days, I would not have ended up paying Dh550.

Editor’s note: We have forwarded the complainant’s response to Sharjah Islamic Bank for further comments. However, its management failed to respond.

(Process initiation: May 1. Response from organisation: May 4. Process completion: May 30.)

Editor’s note: Do you have similar issues that you would like to raise with us? You can write to us at readers@gulfnews.com.