In a bizarre incident, scores of HDFC Bank customers in Chennai have been surprised to have received up to crores of rupees mistakenly. Over 100 customers have received this extra money in their accounts, as per recent reports.
The fiasco started with reports surfacing on Sunday morning that 100 accounts linked to HDFC Bank’s T Nagar branch had received Rs 13 crore each, amounting to a total of Rs 1,300 crore. However, the bank reported that the amount that was transferred to different accounts ranged between some getting in thousands to Rs 13 crore.
The next day, there were reports of two more such customers receiving Rs 23.8 crore, out of which Rs 18 crore went to one person’s account.
The bank later clarified that employees are not involved in the anomalous transactions. An error message was also noticed by some of the bank’s customers following a routine software update on Saturday night (May 28).
A call for enquiry into the incident has been made by CH Venkatachalam, the general secretary of All India Bank Employees Association. He added that customers may face inconvenience if they are asked to explain these large transfers by the Income Tax department. “The computerised system must be foolproof,” he was quoted saying.
The bank has said that 100 accounts saw the faulty transactions but the exact amount of ‘extra money’ deposited at customers is not confirmed. An HDFC spokesperson was quoted in the report as saying that a debit block was placed on the particular accounts after proactive detection. Most of these blocks have been removed and the rest were expected to be done soon.
