ABSA Bank - A charge for every click

In short - i will never deal with ABSA again!

Let me take you a few years back. I was banking with ABSA (Vehicle finance, Cheque Acc, Savings, Investments, Home loan, pretty much every product offered).

One day i tried to close one of the investment accounts, and have all monies transferred to my Cheque Acc. You would think this would be a simple task, but 4 months later the account was still open and i was still being debited.

After numerous other issues such as random bank charges, and poor response times and the inability to resolve issues, i decided that enough was enough and had my cheque acc moved to another bank. I closed all other accounts with ABSA, and only left my home loan and a savings account open. This was to enable quick transactions via my flexi-reserve bond.

At the time, i was informed that the savings account was R4.99 per month and included online banking. WHAT. A. JOKE!

R300 in bank charges later, i query it with ABSA. After all, i'm paying R4.99 p/m, why am I being charged over and above this? In my fight with ABSA to recover my "******" money" i find out that the R4.99 per month only includes the "Online banking facility." Every transaction via online banking has a separate charge. How do you like that for misleading marketing?

Wait, it gets better! During my fight with ABSA, to prove that I have been charged separately for "sms notifications, Online banking fee etc" I download and sent through copies of my statements. This was also charged! Boom, another R293 ****ed away!

Had i known that downloading my statements would cost close to R30 a pop I would have rather requested registered mail just to get some value for money.

So here i am now, R600 down, very little ABSA products and still looking for a way out. If i had the spare R20 000 needed to transfer my bond, trust me, i would do it faster than ABSA can say "BANK CHARGE."