REGINA -- Waking up with an extra $70,000 in your bank account is a dream for most people, but it’s been more of a headache this week for Regina’s Asha Khaladkar.
“I checked my account on Monday morning and discovered that I had been paid 12 times for a grand total of $79,000 and I thought, ‘This isn’t right,’” Khaladkar said.
Khaladkar isn’t alone – a total of six Conexus customers were impacted by an internal system issue at ATB Financial in Alberta that saw accounts receive duplicate debit and credit transactions.
A total of 1,400 customers in Alberta have been affected by the issue, including a non-profit organization that had $52,000 withdrawn from its account.
Conexus says this has happened before, but it’s not common.
“It’s great that all the financial institutions will get together and try to help out the members that are impacted in this way, so it doesn’t happen often, but it has happened before,” Brad Fennig, Executive VP of Operations with Conexus, said.
Fennig added that Conexus has options set up for customers to be aware of unusual activity on their accounts.
“It’s a good opportunity to remind people to set up alerts on their accounts and their online banking, so when triggers like this happen they get notified right away and then they’re able to adjust and react as fast as possible,” Fennig said.
Khaladkar says she’s relieved she wasn’t in a dire situation financially when this happened and that funds weren’t being taken out of her account. While it doesn’t discourage her from using online banking, she plans to be more careful moving forward.
“It definitely makes you think about sort of online banking and all of these processes that are going on that maybe don’t know about or don’t even think about and all these other companies that may be involved,” Khaladkar said.
According to Conexus, Payments Canada is working closely with ATB Financial on a solution and any customer who notices an issue with their account should contact Conexus at 1-800-667-7477 immediately.
