Innocent Obaro, a Lagos resident, has accused God Is Good Logistics (GIGL) and Standard Chartered Bank of refusing to refund his N23,000 payment for over six months, despite writing to them several times.
Obaro said that he paid for a package at the GIG Logistics office in Lekki on February 17 via their point-of-sale system but did not get a debit alert notification nor a prompt the transaction was successful until he tried to make a transfer to the logistics firm.
He said that, upon checking his bank app, he found that Standard Chartered, his bank, had debited him. So he informed the attendant, thinking that the matter would be resolved within a few days, but it never was.
Obaro contacted Standard Chartered via X, where they confirmed the deduction and assured him that the issue would be resolved within 24 hours. However, when the problem persisted, he visited the bank’s physical office to lodge a formal complaint.
In June, Obaro said, Standard Chartered stated in an email that “we had contacted the acquiring bank with a view to resolving the dispute for the below POS transaction at POS LA NG and they have availed us the journal roll for transaction (a bank-to-bank document) which has shown from their end that the POS transaction was successful”.
The debit alert message
A copy of the email saw showed that, for situations where there is a disputed transaction on a third-party point-of-sale, one of the processes laid down for banks to resolve the complaint is to raise a dispute with the other bank which they will accept or decline. In this case, the other bank declined the reversal request.
“In a situation where the bank is unable to provide any of the above, they will refund the bank and the same will be passed on to the customer’s account.
Unfortunately, in this scenario, they have provided the documents agreed by regulation and as such will not be making any refund to us,” the email from Standard Chartered read in part.
Obaro said that, after he got this message, he reached out to GIG Logistics, hoping that they would refund his money but they kept saying that their account team had not received the funds.
FIJ emailed GIG Logistics on Friday. The logistics company requested that the source contact them directly, which Obaro has done. Standard Chartered has yet to respond to FIJ’s email from Friday at press time.
(C) FIJ
