Dear Cardbhai,
In august last year, when I got my CIBIL report I was shocked to see six credit cards reported from HSBC. 4 of these cards turned out to be wrongly reported. I identified a process flaw in HSBC related to expiry and issue of renewed credit cards. In this case, the old card outstanding was transferred to the new card and the new card outstanding was completely paid by me. However they still reported the old card outstanding as on the date of expiry of the card to CIBIL. This happened for four cards. With the help of banking ombudsman, I got this corrected. I wrote to them for compensation. They say it is not in line with their policies. After several conversations, it is clear that there is some prejudice against me as I reported this process flaw.
The two other credit cards have principal outstanding of INR 9700 and INR 11000 in HSBC as of September 2004.
I have been talking to them for the past one year and now they are asking me to pay the full outstanding which is at INR 2.3 Lakhs and 5.1 Lakhs (total 7.4 Lakhs). It was spent by a relative who later forgot to make the payments. This was a mistake.
A very important aspect was that they issued a new gold credit card to me in December 05. This was within a year of the above two cards were invalidated. This card is still active with me till date and HSBC has all my contact details. They increased the limit on these cards twice to 3.3 Lakhs in Sep 08. They had my contact details from dec 2005 and they never bothered to call me even once to ask me to pay this outstanding. Also I would have called them 100 times for various reasons but they never mentioned that these cards were overdue. Their prejudice only increased as this factor clearly amounts to 'Deficiency in service with objective of making money with unwarranted interest income and other charges'
The total outstanding for these two cards was less than 3.5 Lakhs last year as per cibil report when I approached them. Now they are asking me to pay complete outstanding of 7.4 Lakhs to get clear CIBIL status.
Further, they are asking me to wait almost indefinitely and in the background increasing my current outstandings.
As per my lawyer, I have a strong case in consumer forum they never approached me inspite of having my new address as per the new card. Also the compensation for four wrongly reported cards is something I plan to claim. Thirdly, they are just increasing the outstanding on the pretext of providing me an amicable solution. On every new promised resolution date, they just come back and ask me to pay the outstanding as on current date. This is very frustrating.
Please advice.
Thanks,
