Bank accounts in the red and angry customers, that’s what Česká spořitelna’s Saturday looked like. The bank encountered an error in the George application that caused duplicate card transactions made by clients in the past week. The balance on the accounts of some people even reportedly reached negative values, which complicated them a lot.
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The bank’s accounts on social networks were then flooded with comments through several stories of how the company’s mistake affected clients’ lives. Whether it was a burden of health due to shock and fear or a stalemate at a gas station without the ability to pay.
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Where did the error occur during the application update?
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“We regularly implement new functionalities in Internet banking. We always collect – for example once every two months or once a quarter – all the functions we want to enrich the banking with and then, usually on the night from Friday to Saturday, the banking is shut down and changes are made, “said List of Reports František Bouc from the press center Czech Savings Banks.
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According to him, this is a relatively robust IT operation. “So it may happen that some client accounts have duplicated transactions that were made with a payment card last week,” Bouc said.
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What did people see in the accounts?
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Because of this, one then saw in his report the deducted double value of the transactions he actually carried out. For example, if someone made a transaction for 5 thousand, it could turn out that they actually made a transaction for 10 thousand.
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We knew about it, it was just a technical error. We also gave George a notice, which appeared after logging in. It said that we were aware of the error, and let people not worry that it was just a system error. Now everything is solved, so the problem is no longer relevant.
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Exactly. I also stared when payments started on my account and I was sitting at my computer at home. I started flying and checking where my card was and everything else. This is just a blatant fail from this bank.
– VladimirCZE ???????? (@klejko) July 26, 2020
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Has this bug affected everyone who has the George app?
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It didn’t affect all the people within George, it only affected some group of clients. But I say, at this point, the problem has been eliminated and everything should be in the right values.
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The fictitious double posting of transactions took about half a day and it was just a display error. As for client accounts and real balances on them, we are, of course, doing the right thing and we know what the real situation is there.
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When you say that the deduction was fictitious, how is it possible that some people actually went into the red and could not pay after “counting” the transaction?
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Yes, you’re right, it could have happened. When I said fictitious, I meant that it wasn’t like we were registering for those accounts that they were really in the red, but the system was just set up like this automatically.
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If it really happened to someone that he had a relatively low balance on his account and the duplication of certain transactions caused him to get to zero or to the minus, in this case a person – if he does not have an agreed overdraft – automatically gets into a situation where basically it will not let go and a blockage will occur. It’s like running out of credit on a cell phone.
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However, it really could have happened in units of cases, I say in units because it was purely a payment card transaction during the last week. It is not entirely common and common for someone to make such large transactions in such a way that they duplicate to zero or minus them, but it could have happened.
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Has such a thing ever happened before?
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Something can happen from time to time. The operation is always a robust solution and virtually every bank after it can have some major or minor shortcomings. Of course, we carefully monitor it and then remove it. I am not aware that this type of problem has ever occurred.
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