Andre in Chile

You remember the Austrian Bank called Volksbank-Tirol who blocked my father’s account and then took 24000 EUR from it without any authorization?

Well the case got more and more bizarre after I wrote about it. The bank went to court and called, me, my father and my brother for fraud. The reason? Well difficult to explain since my father had no debts. But he transferred 28000 EUR to my wife as a loan towards our new house. Or he wanted to. The bank did not allow this transfer and the rest of the story you know – or you can find here: Volksbank-Tirol Theft, Breach of Secrecy You can imagine me going through a rough time even if I knew that neither me nor my family did something wrong. Needless to say the courts decided it was too bizarre and did not even take up the case. Mind you the police did investigate and you can imagine that even though we knew that we did nothing wrong it did cause us some nights without much sleep.

Now the good news The awesome people from National Austrian TV (ORF 2) decided that this case was so bizarre and wrong that they reported on it in a Documentation where they bring cases where David has to fight Goliath and where something goes so wrong that you can say the case stinks. The case will be a warning to others so they know what the bank is capable of doing. An entire 14 Minutes on National TV (ORF 2) with the entire story. Can you imagine what this is worth? Should you speak German, the show is online until Friday:

Here are my father an his lawyer in the Television Studio. Volksbank-Tirol was also invited to send a representative but declined.

My father is still hoping that the bank will come to senses and offer to undo the damage. I don’t think this will happen. A lawsuit started by my father to get the money back can cost anything from 30000 EUR if it goes to high court. My family’s lawyer thinks there is a high probability that it would to high court

What is the alternative? Noise, noise noise. No we don’t want to damage the bank. Hell we could not do that. But what we want to do is tell the story to everybody – exactly what happened – so we would not want to defame the bank would we. We also want to tell the stories of others who had the same trouble with this bank, believe me we already heard some scary cases from people who called after my father was on National TV. Of course if nothing helps they will have to start court action. Sad that it is not like in the States where you could probably take a million dollar for emotional damages.

The concept of the idea I got from Tiffany over at TalkTalkhell She did an awesome job a few years back when half of Britain had problems with their broad band connection and did not rest as the corporate lawyers threaten to sue her out of existence.

PS: a little disclaimer so that the trigger happy bank does not try to sue me again. The Title is opinion. In my eyes the bank robbed my father. Courts may see this differently

PPS: No it is not the bank that is bad. There are people who operate there. The senior Management of Volksbank-Tirol are the ones who make the decisions and made the call to stop the report of the regional Magazine that was being prepared.