Customers of GT Bank besiege head office over debits

Some aggrieved customers of GT Bank have massed up at the premises of the headquarters of the financial institution on Monday to protest suspicious debits on their accounts.

The customers in question have been accused of trading in cryptocurrencies.

The angry customers were at the bank’s head office at North Ridge to demand an urgent rectification of their concerns.

Some customers of the bank dealing in forex took to social media to complain of supposed illegal debits on their accounts which triggered the bank to issue an explainer.

GT Bank explained that: “the referenced debits are solely the FX differential between the unapproved FX rates applied on the crypto trading platforms and standard FX rates applicable to all other valid transactions advised by the Bank. GTBank Ghana has taken steps to engage individual customers who were involved in these transactions. The Bank remains a business operating under the laws in the financial industry and will not unduly cause its customers’ dissatisfaction in any regard.”

“In reference to the public notices issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Bank of Ghana (BoG), cryptocurrencies are not an approved legal tender in Ghana and the general public has been warned to desist from transacting in them as doing so is at their own risk. The online platforms on which they are traded have not been issued any license and for that matter, are not regulated. Hence, all merchants and platforms offering such cryptocurrencies are to be reported to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Ghana for necessary action.”

The aggrieved customers argue that they have not committed any financial crimes in their trading activities with the crypto giant Binance.

Speaking to Citi News, the affected customers said the freeze is negatively affecting them.

“We were able to prove to them that the deductions they made on our account are not fair, and we were able to prove to them that the company that helped us in the transaction did not charge us anything rather than cedis,” one customer said.

“We are not satisfied, we don’t need words, we need documents and proof that we committed some mistakes with the transactions that we did, and they haven’t been able to do that. If they are able to prove to us that the transactions we made were wrong and were charged in Dollars, we will be fine,” another said.

---citinewsroom