Standard Bank - Ridiculous Charges On Dormant Account

So need to start with background. So a couple of years ago now my wife and I decided to move her account from Standard Bank to FNB for the simple reason that changing her cellphone number and new surname on their records required her to produce an original marriage certificate. Without that, which at the time we did not have with us since we moved to a new province recently, they couldn't help us. FNB branch was happy to create a new account without these details and I was already a customer of theirs it made good sense.

So we swopped over and made sure to leave a positive balance on the account (I distinctly remember a deposit of R150 being made that we never withdrew).

Fast forward a couple of years and we realised we never closed the account. Now at the time we thought it can't be too bad because it was a student achiever account and should stop after a period of time. A couple of days ago my wife reached out to the call center to see if she can confirm the account had closed because of dormancy, but was promptly told to visit a branch. During covid. While she's 7 months pregnant.

I happened to think about it and logged on tonight to find a whopping R6200 negative balance on the account; one which we've not used in 3+ years and have not had a card of for as long.

At no point was she contacted about this account going into arrears or even that it was upgraded to a different account type, and it seems someone took it upon themselves to enable an overdraft facility which I would guess is why the account was allowed to go into negative and attract such large interest charges.

We've mailed customer services again, but I guess we're going to be asked to go to a branch again.

Terribly disappointed that this can be allowed to happen even in such a highly regulated industry.