Keep an eagle eye out for obscure debit order references

It’s a piece of advice I dispense regularly: “Go through your bank statement carefully every month”.

Along with “always read the small print”, the habit has the potential to spare consumers untold financial and emotional misery.

But some service providers don’t make these self-preservation exercises easy: some small print is so tiny and faint as to be virtually illegible, and some debit order references on bank statements do little to identify the company doing the collecting.

Payment Association of SA (PASA) rules do require a certain level of detail when it comes to how a company taking your money identifies itself on your bank statement.

“Both the abbreviated name of the collector, and the contract reference number must be included when a debit order is collected,” PASA told me.

“And the abbreviated name is required to be 10 characters.”

So two-letter abbreviations don’t cut it.

About five years ago, I investigated the case of a woman who had upgraded her MTN cellphone contract in a store in 2012, taking out a “24-hour Mobility” handset insurance policy via brokers Pinnacle Marketing.

She stopped using that phone in January 2014, when she upgraded her contract and opted to add her new cellphone to her short-term insurance policy.

In 2018, she noticed a R97 deduction on her back account, with the reference “Monitor” which meant nothing to her, unsurprisingly.

Her bank gave her a contact number, which led her to Pinnacle Marketing.

By then she had paid about R4,600 to insure a cellphone she wasn’t using.

And I’m quite sure many people are paying cellphone insurance premiums every month for handsets they stopped using years ago.

I recently took up the case of Nic Manias, who cancelled his membership of Just Gym in Umhlanga (part of Planet Fitness) in late 2016, when his contract term ended.

Or so he thought. Planet Fitness continued to debit his bank account and sadly he did not keep a copy of that letter.

In October 2017, while Manias was in hospital, his wife called Planet Fitness to request the cancellation.

But the debit orders continued.

“As the debit orders on my bank statement did not state Planet Fitness and showed only ‘PF’ and a number, I was under the impression that it was one of my life policies, so I did not query it,” he said.

He asked Planet Fitness to refund all debit orders from the date he first cancelled the contract.

When that didn’t happen, he contacted me for help.

I queried several issues with Planet Fitness, mainly why his bank statement reference was such that it would not instantly alert members that the amount had been debited by Planet Fitness.

Here’s what I was told: * “Members need to keep proof of their cancellation requests.”

* “The member’s wife contacted us on October 18 2017, telephonically requesting to cancel her husband’s membership agreement. [But] the main member would have had to contact us in writing or contact our customer service department to cancel their membership.”

* “We did not have confirmation from the main member confirming cancellation, only the cancellation request, which was made by the wife. Hence the membership remained active, and the member continued to be debited.”

* “The reference for the payments on the member’s statement would reflect as “PF GYM PLANETFS.”

* “The member has received multiple communication from Planet Fitness reminding him that his membership is still active, using email and his contact number we had on record for him.”

* “There will be no refund due to the member, [but] we have written off the outstanding amount of R917.80 and we can confirm that the membership is cancelled.”

I asked whether Manias’s wife was told that her phone call was not regarded as cancellation of her husband’s membership and that he had to make that call himself.

“She would have been,” I was told.

Asked to play that call recording, Planet Fitness said the files for those calls “are not kept that far back as we’d need a far bigger server”.

The company had dealt with Manias’s case “according to what the procedure would have been followed at the time, and is regularly checked”, I was told.

On the issue of the bank statement notification, I pointed out that Manias’s statement had referenced his R438 monthly payment as only “PF” with a number.

Planet Fitness told me that was what his bank had chosen as a reference.

“We send them info on what the payment is and they [the bank] decide what it says for their client.

“We are not sure why they would put detail like that which a client does not understand.”

Naturally I ran that past Standard Bank, which firmly contradicted that.

“The following are the registered short names with PASA for Planet Fitness,” the bank said: “PFGYMFEE, PFLEVYFEE and PF.

“We use what is given to us by Planet Fitness for collection, and for this customer PF was supplied.”

Asked to comment, Planet Fitness said: “We don’t only bank with Standard Bank , and provided me with a list of”11 abbreviations of its name for bank statement purposes, four with Standard Bank including PF and PLANETFIT and seven with Absa, including PLANETFIT and PFHOLDING.

Interestingly, in March, Manias’s debit order reference suddenly appeared on his bank statement not as “PF” but as “PLANETFIT”, which is how he was finally alerted to fact that the company had been debiting him for years.

Similarly, When Vanessa Perumal said when she wanted to cancel her Planet Fitness contract in 2017, she was told she had to do so in the Craighall Park branch, which she did.

She also recently discovered that the company had continued to debit her bank account, but because the statement reference changed from “Pf Gym Fee” to just “Pf -” in 2017 after she cancelled her contract, she assumed it was an insurance policy premium debit.

It was only last month, when the reference on her bank statement changed to “PlanetFit”, that she realised the debit order had never been cancelled.

Commenting on Perumal’s Facebook post about the issue, Lee-Anne Bac said the same had happened to both her and her husband since 2016.

“The only reason we found out this month [March] is because they changed the name of the debit order from ‘PF’ to ‘PLANETFIT’,” she said.

“We both thought the debit order was for one of our retirement funds.”

So what prompted the abbreviation change?

“We normally run the debit order via Standard Bank but we had an issue, so we had to use Absa for that specific run,” Planet Fitness explained.

No doubt those unwitting debit order payers, for whom the penny dropped on seeing PLANETFIT on their March statements, are very grateful for that banking “issue”.

So here’s the revised advice: Check your bank statements, line by line, every month, and make no assumptions about the debit order references. Check!