A woman from Edmonton, Canada who spent two years fighting with her bank to obtain information about her own account is going public with documents breaking the confidentiality agreement she signed. All this in an effort to expose a secretive system build against the customer she says.
During an interview at her home for Go Public, the woman who documented many telephone calls and emails revealed boxes of printed material — the aftereffect of her long battle with CIBC for a document she says would demonstrate unauthorized transactions on her account.
The unauthorized transaction was a $691 moved from an account which belongs to her and her husband to an account which belonged to her and her son but that was closed a month ago.
Then she explains according to the document she finally obtained, that the bank reopened the account without her permission or knowledge and a CIBC manager and another employee signed the transaction document with their own names.
She could not explain why the bank would do that and we might never know.
During her long battle, in the beginning, she was told that too much time passed to get an answer about her request. But the woman was persistent and the main concern she had was not only the unauthorized transaction on her account but the difficulty to obtain information on her account, and to get an answer about why happened the unauthorized transaction.
Then she filed a complaint with CIBC Ombudsman’s Office. They requested that she sign a confidentiality agreement promising to not disclose to anybody things the document might reveal. In this way intimidating the woman that legal charges might be filed against her if she discloses any information.
She accepted to sign the confidentiality agreement. However, she made the documents public exposing the secretive system of the banking complaints.
The woman did not lose any money in the unauthorized transaction, however, the bank offered a settlement but not admitting any wrongdoing.
Unhappy with the investigation results the woman escalated her claim to the national independent Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI), where she was asked again to sign in a confidentiality agreement.
The second investigation offered her another settlement but no explanation about why the unauthorized transaction happened.
All this lack of transparency and intimidation shows how centralized systems might be corrupted altered and hide things for their convenience. This is why we need Bitcoin. It is time to separate the money form the state and change radically our old financial system that has many points of failure.