Weird bank account behavior and RBI intervention

Social Off-topic & Debates
1

Recently my wife’s account in Bank of Baroda behaved rather unusual.

We were doing a transaction on IRCTC and the payment failed which is very much normal during tatkal time. But happened after that was pretty crazy

First i got the transaction failed message from irctc, then got an email saying the netbanking facility was disabled as per my consent, here i thought the email could be fake like phishing email or something.

Later I got a message from BOB saying UPI services are disabled on my account, panic crept in as i had about 50k in that account. I tried to transfer all my money through phonepe but as the message said the upi was indeed blocked.

I was still able to check my accoutn balance through phonepe which kept showing me the same balance i had so atleast my money was still there.

I called up BOB and the lady had no clue why the netbanking or UPI was disabled (pathetic CC). We went to the nearest branch and the lady asked exactly 3 questions,
a. Who are we and where do we live
b. what we do for a living and do we often do forex transactions of large amounts
c. If my wife was working somewhere without disclosing it in ITR

me and my wife looked at each other and thought either these guys were crazy or we did something really terrible :laughing:

My wife uses this account purely for grocery shopping and never had the per day transactions crossed 5000rs and the max amount that was ever in this account was 1 lac.

I explained this clearly to the bank manager and he too felt that why this account got flagged in this manner.
It turns out the RBI has complete control of individual bank accounts of every person in India irrespective of the bank which controls it.

RBI had sent the bank an email about this account citing suspicious and fraudulent activities involving out of country transactions and malicious intent as they had noticed a quick succession of about 50 transactions in a span of few seconds.

But when the manager checked there was absolutely nothing wrong in the bank statement or history. He also mentioned in the last 6 months or so the RBI has been flagging accounts like this one and has been sending notices to various banks.

Anyways the solution to this was simple, the bank sends a representative to the address of the account holder, confirms their identity and replies back to the RBI stating the enquiry result after which the RBI reverses all the holds they put in for the accoutn and life will be back to normal .

ufff what a crazy experience.

2

This is not true, the individual banks have control over your account but not RBI itself. It does however control the rules and regulations so therefore the banks would act based on RBI’s order.

Your bank or NPCI can detect fraudulent activity but rbi cannkt

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3

Thanks for the share. Really need to be careful. What about persons who are travelling and this sort of Blocking happens? Really a double edged sword.

4

The manager clearly said RBI can deactivate he accounts based on need because if the bank had done it they would know it right.

5

This can probably happen because one of shop’s owner where you made UPI payment were using his personal account than a business account for transactions. And a RBI black listed person also paid the shop owner through UPI. Everybody in the chain will have their account blocked.

This is a serious issue Indians are facing with nefarious interests exploiting the situation for quite sometime.

How you were able to resolve the issue, what’s the status now ?

6

image

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7

You are lucky that you got off easily.

People in other places had to struggle a lot of this. Good for you.

8

I’m surprised at the shit that these “bankers” do and people actually buy it up. A central bank with control on every individual account - it happens only in India. You try to help them with facts but you get an education in banking instead.

It was fun to read. Got to be careful of the RBI monitoring my bank accounts.

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