Last September, I encountered unrecognized transactions in my bank account. I initiated a chargeback process, which ultimately resulted in a full refund, but not without significant challenges and lessons learned. The process was lengthy, taking two months, and required frequent assistance from Bunq support to understand the status of my case and any necessary actions on my part.
One major issue was the confusing status of the refunds in the Bunq app. Refund requests don't show up in search, forcing me to constantly scroll through my history. Even then, the provided status information is not up-to-date. Some chargebacks still appear to be in progress, even now after resolution. And in the end you should probably ignore the transaction information in the app timeline because:
There were discrepancies between the transaction amounts shown in the app timeline and those in the PDF/CSV exports. You should definitely inform yourself on the exports, because only here you seem to get a reliable overview of the actual transactions (see below)! For instance, the app displayed a transaction of €200, while €500 was actually deducted from my account. This discrepancy was only visible in the export documents. It turned out the vendor had increased the transaction amount post-payment, but the app only reflected the original amount. When I received a €200 chargeback, I was initially unaware that an additional €300 was still pending. After raising this issue, Bunq refunded the difference.
To improve the chargeback process, I suggest the following enhancements:
- Ensure the app timeline displays accurate and complete transaction information, avoiding hidden changes in transaction amounts.
- Provide a clear, up-to-date overview of ongoing chargeback cases within the app.
- Improve the response time of support services, as it sometimes took up to 1.5 weeks to receive a reply.
These changes could significantly enhance user experience and trust.
Why I believe that the PDF/CSV exports provide a more reliable transaction overview?
At first I made a CSV export of all the transactions of the bank account. This was 11k transactions going back to 2015. First I wanted to make sure the saldo was correct, so I summed up the "Amount" column and luckily this matched the bank saldo in the app. Then I looked up the fraudulent transactions and saw the discrepancy with the payments in the app timeline. This shows that the app timeline probably doesn't add up to the same saldo. You will probably take some time making sense of all the different transactions. In my case the fraudster tried to empty the account with many tries and types of payment, so many of these failed which end up in two transactions: one negative and one positive. Also you'll find refund transactions on later dates. You'll be manually trying to match-up these transactions to end up with an actual list of transactions that haven't been refunded yet. This is also how I encountered the transaction of €500 which wasn't anywhere to be found on the app timeline. After chatting with support they told me the vendor had increased the amount after the payment. Watch out with these because you want to make sure the correct amount is refunded!
