
How money moved out of BookMyForex cards as customers scrambled for answers
Mumbai: At 3:50 am on a quiet Kolkata morning, 35-year-old numerologist Vivek Baid woke up to a string of notifications that would upend his day. One message became two, then three. By 4 am, he had received eight transaction alerts for his forex card.
All eight, he said, were successful.“My money was being deducted in front of my eyes,” Baid said.The deductions, he said, totalled around ₹1,45,000. The amounts were debited in United Arab Emirates Dirham, the currency loaded on his Yes Bank-BookMyForex multi-currency prepaid forex card, but the transactions reflected in Brazilian real. He has since filed a complaint with the cybercrime authorities.The card was launched in August 2019 as a co-branded multi-currency prepaid forex card by BookMyForex, in partnership with Yes Bank, on the Visa network.
Yes Bank’s website adds that the card has been developed in collaboration with M2P, a fintech company based in Chennai.It was marketed as a seamless solution for international travellers, allowing them to load multiple foreign currencies onto a single card. Baid is among a group of customers who found their forex cards used at grocery stores and other locations in Brazil, and received little help when they tried to reach BookMyForex customer service or Yes Bank.In the early hours of that morning, Baid said convenience turned into confusion. He immediately tried reaching out to BookMyForex, the online forex marketplace owned by MakeMyTrip.
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