China CITIC Bank Charges Annual Fees Without Customer Consent

Communist China’s CCP virus prevention measures, the city-wide lockdown, and factional infighting within the Chinese Communist Party have caused investment, consumption, and foreign trade to plummet and created severe fiscal deficits. The CCP often takes money from the pockets of ordinary people, and the financial sector is full of chaos.

 Recently, there have been frequent cases of violations of laws and regulations and misappropriation of public funds in the financial system. China CITIC Bank recently revealed an incident of charging 2,000 yuan for annual fees from depositors’ credit cards without their consents. And a complaint platform in China is full of complaints about China CITIC Bank’s indiscriminate charges on credit cards. 

 According to a local source, the customer service staff of the China CITIC Bank Credit Card Center reached out a bunch of customers through phone calls, praised them with good credit scores and invited them to upgrade to platinum card for free. However, the staff did not properly inform the customers about an annual fee of 2,000 yuan that would be incurred after the upgrade, nor that the annual fee could not be waived or offset through other means after the upgrade.

 On June 23, according to another local source, Mr. Yu, a citizen of Harbin said the 460,000 yuan in his Yu’ebao bank account was frozen. Alipay said in a statement that Yu’s account was temporarily frozen due to suspicious transactions that may involve illegal acts such as online gambling. Later, the restrictions on Yu’s account were lifted.

 It is worth noting that the People’s Bank of China, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission jointly issued new regulations in January this year. From March 1, for commercial banks, village banks and other financial institutions to handle a single transaction of over RMB 50,000 or any foreign currency equivalent to US1,000 dollars or more, customers will be asked to provide the source of funds or purpose of the transaction.