Sofía Mackinlay, a real estate agent, received in her monthly Visa credit card statement an expense that she had not made and wanted to contact her bank, Galicia, to find out about it. Difficult mission. “I called many times, one afternoon for at least two hours, they attended me, they took me to another place and after a long time someone else answered and told me: ‘No, this is not the sector.’ And they passed me to another and it was cut, ”recalls Sofía. She gave up and went to the Visa website. “Since I didn’t remember the username or password, it asked me for all my card details, including the security code, but I still couldn’t get in,” she continues. She later spoke with one of her sisters, who warned her about what is repeated ad nauseam in bank warning advertisements: “No, baby, nowhere can they ask you for the security code of your card . Call Visa and let them know that you may have entered the wrong page and provided all your card details.” “I felt like a moron,” Sofia confesses. She called Visa, she spent another two hours on the phone, between the delays in answering her, they transferred her to another employee, she hung up. “The problem is that there are no people in the call center and many of those who work there have no idea about the procedures,” she concludes. In the end, one of those who attended her clarified: “Yes, the Visa page asks for the security code to verify identity.” Sofia breathed a sigh of relief and was finally able to solve her problem.
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Not for nothing in the report of the first quarter of the year of claims in the National Directorate for Consumer Protection financial services and insurance are the category with the most complaints, some 12,812, 18% of the total, above communications services and household appliances. In turn, of these more than 12,000 protests, 34.9% corresponded to credit cards; 16.2% to savings banks; 13.4% to product packages and 11.2% to insurance. Why do people complain so much about cards? First of all, for the “partial or defective” compliance with the provision of the service, according to the address led by Adrián Ganino and who answers to the Secretary of Domestic Trade, Roberto Feletti. Second, fraud or scam issues. Third, failure to process termination of service. Then, breach of offer, promotions or bonuses. In the first item, that of partial or defective non-compliance, users point to improper debits or collections, lack of recognition of payments, imposition of unsolicited insurance, blocking of the card and rejection of the plastic or requirement of a minimum amount in participating businesses.
Credit card companies wash their hands and hold the banks that issue them accountable. “You should check with the issuing banks. We do not have the attention to the clients of the banks”, they respond in Visa. In Naranja X they preferred to avoid comments. Nor did Cencosud, Mastercard and American Express respond. And banks are also in this business, a market where the top ten is made up of Nación, Galicia, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Santander, BBVA, Macro, Credicoop, HSBC, Ciudad de Buenos Aires. and ICBC. In the face of user complaints, elDiarioAR he consulted all ten banks, but none offered an official answer. In one of them they commented on the accumulation of claims not only for the cards but for other banking services: “You saw that they are services that are too massive, like no other, since they cannot be compared with electricity, cable or water, which are simple and linear. On the other hand, a financial service client has perhaps a dozen simultaneous services in the same package or entity”.
In the association Defense of Users and Consumers (Deuco), its president, Pedro Bussetti, receives more claims against banks than against cards and for various reasons. This Thursday a beneficiary of the Income Reinforcement bonus, Diego Gordon, wrote to him: “I had contacted you through the IFE (Emergency Family Income) because the bank had stolen the money from me and you were able to solve it for me. I would like to tell you that they have just deposited the first installment of the bonus, 9,000 pesos, and again the bank sucked them out of me and won’t let me take them out! “We received this first claim of a situation similar to the one we dealt with in 2020,” Bussetti tells elDiarioAR. “Those who collected the IFE, different banks withheld the subsidy for debts to companies or official organizations. This may be a similar situation. In 2020, we attended to 125 cases that we resolved by making the claims directly to each bank. It is established that these subsidies are unattachable, but some banks do not respect the norm. It may be that the situation repeats itself, ”he warns.
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