From an Australian friend:

Dear friends,

I am somewhat incensed at what has just happened to me.

It is really in line with that story about the raffle for the race horse. This story was originally told about the banks.

Briefly, a race horse was raffled at $1.00 per ticket and won by someone. When he received his prize (the race horse) he discovered that it was dead and had been dead for some time. He contacted the raffle organisers. They said: "Oh, is that so? Here is your dollar back." The question you must ask, of course, is what about all the other people who bought tickets.

Now, back to my problem.

I wanted to pay money to my bankcard from a special account. The only way I could do it was to pay the amount into my normal bank account and then transfer the amount to the bankcard via internet banking.

I paid the money into the account and then looked at the internet and saw the money was there and then transferred it to the bankcard. Obviously, I could not do this transaction until the money was there to transfer. Everything was fine and it all worked well.

Some weeks later I got a bank statement and realised that I had been charged interest. I traced it back and discovered that on the day I did these transfers, the bank had put a balance in after every transaction and had chosen to do the withdrawals before the deposits, although everything was done on the same day.

Let me emphasise that I could not have done the transfer to the bankcard if the money was not showing in the account. It would not have worked.

Because the account showed a negative balance, even though it was back in credit at the end of the day, I was charged interest.

I rang the bank, as you would, incensed, as you would imagine. The girl said that was no problem and they would have the interest reversed within the next two or three weeks.

I am now waiting for her supervisor, to phone me back to hear my displeasure over the event and the delay in refunding my money.

Incidentally, the interest charge did not appear on the bank statement near the questionable transactions, but a month later.

I am writing this to you so that you may be aware of what actually happened to me and and probably you, at the hands of banks.

In the words of the race horse story; yes, they returned my dollar, but what about people who are normally overdrawn and don't realise this is happening.

Finally, banks are a bad breed.