I owe Standard Bank a shocking ammount of money without knowing!

I moved to South Korea at the end of 2017, I decided to open up an Capitec account which would allow me to access my money over seas. I still had a Standard bank account with about R300 in it but never got so far as to close it before I left on my adventure.

In July 2018 I randomly checked my Standard bank online application which said that my account was -R1500.

I rapidly emailed standard bank to ask what was going on and if I could close my account? They kept on saying how they can’t help me online and I’d have to come into the branch. I tried to explain to them that I am not in the country and I will visit when I’m back but that I needed some assistance then when I was not in the country. They kept on sending me the generic message saying that I’d have to come into the bank for them to help me.

In 2019 January when I got back in the country I was owning standard bank R2660! R150 was being taken down from my account every month because there was no money in my savings account to transfer to my “holiday” account (my own account within the savings account).

I also understand that I’d have to pay my penalties and that a bank has certain rules and bankcosts, but the big problem was that I didn’t have enough money in my main account to pay into my own account within my own account.

The shocking thing is that if I didn’t randomly look on my Standard Bank online application when I was overseas I would have still not been aware of he fact that I was in dept at Standard Bank. I never once received a message or a phone call from Standard Bank checking up and asking what was going on.

In July 2018 when I tried to stop my account or even put it on hold until I got back into the country, I had no assistance from Standard Bank nor did they advice me to close my “holiday” account within my savings account which was *****ing R150 every month.

I can’t help but feel like they didn’t reach out to me because they are trying to catch people like this!