Customer Complaints Against Public Sector Banks High in AP: Ombudsman

According to the Andra Pradesh banking ombudsman, public sector banks accounted for 72% of the total complaints lodged by customers during the year 2011-12. According to the AP banking ombudsman, it had received 5267 complaints this year as against 5012 complaints last fiscal year.

Interestingly, it is observed that state-run State Bank of India, alone accounted for almost half of the total complaints of 47.2% during the year 2011-12, up from 41% last year.

Of the total complaints, the majority of the complaints received were regarding ATM cards, debit cards, credit cards and these accounted for 29.22% during the year as against 26% last year. The complaints include disputes related to failed ATM transactions, fraudulent POS transactions over internet regarding debit card information, lot of harassment from banks in collection of credit card dues and no settlements conveyed orally by collection agents.

The AP banking ombudsman said that, complaints relating to fraudulent internet banking transactions involve phishing and compromise of security information. Also, mobile phones increasingly used for internet based banking transactions for which one-time passwords are used have major issues with the duplicate SIM cards issued by mobile telecom operators. It is observed that, fraudsters are intercepting one-time passwords by obtaining duplicate SIM cards of bank customers.