Cash-less! Rs 100 crore 'debited' from mechanical engineer's account

A mechanical engineer from Agra, Sandeep Tiwari, was in for a rude shock on discovering that a sum of Rs 99,99,91,723.36 had been 'debited' from his State Bank of India (SBI) account.

According to a report in the Times of India, Tiwari is an employee of a factory, and earns around Rs 25,000 a month. He only had some hundreds left in his bank account when he went to withdraw some cash. "On Tuesday evening, when I went to withdraw cash at an ATM, the machine rejected my request and flashed a message of insufficient balance, which was surprise to me, as I knew I was still left with some cash in my account. Later, when I checked the account balance, it showed that I owed a whopping Rs 100 crore to the bank," Tiwari was quoted as saying by TOI.

"I didn't know what to do. I had opened this account in 2013 when I was pursuing mechanical engineering from college in Bichpuri. Later, I had got my bank account transferred to another branch, which is close to my home. The bank owes me an explanation for



such a terrible mistake, which has prevented me from accessing my hard earned money," he further told the paper.

Interestingly, a banking official explained that this is a technical way of blocking his account as he had not updated his KYC details. Govind Maheshwari, public relations officer of SBI Agra, told TOI, "No money has been debited from the customer's (Sandeep Tiwari) saving account. His money is safe. The system has blocked the banking services, as even after several reminders, the customer had not updated his 'know your customer' (KYC) details."

He added, "Banking services can be blocked, if the savings account of customer goes in minus. The automatic banking system has erroneously debited close to Rs 100 crore and it will be rectified, once the customer updates his KYC details."

The incident is in start contrast to the one a few days back when it was reported that Rs 9,806 crore was credited to the State Bank of Patiala (SBoP) Jan Dhan account of a taxi driver from Punjab.