Do you have in Germany a banking arbitrator? In Italy we have and it’s separate from the central bank. Or maybe the consumer protection?
There is one - but its not comparable to arbitrators in other countries:
First, the one responsible for my bank is run by the interest group of public banks in Germany. Although they do say that they operate independently, I would not fully trust in this. Second, the process can take multiple months and third it is non-binding for the bank:
If only one party rejects the proposal, the mediation attempt has failed. In this case, the proposal has no legal effect whatsoever, and both parties are free to pursue their claims through the ordinary courts.
From what I’ve heard, some banks simply use the arbitration process as a way to buy time and then simply reject the arbitration result if it’s not in their favor. Then arbitration will result in nothing but wasted time.
There is no official government-backed consumer protection in Germany either. There are a bunch of associations which receive some money from the government but are highly underfunded. Those are sometimes volunteers and often people without a legal background. Quite high chances, too, that they would not accept a case from a non-resident. Mostly “toothless tigers” - and more for extremely obvious cases (such as: “I paid for something and received a defective item”) or cases that affect thousands of people (i.e. bank X has incorrectly charged a fee for all of their customers). Also, responsibilities of which consumer-protection group covers which topics are often highly complex and they have many exceptions (i.e. in my case, it could very well be that they would reject it because it involves a non-German bank, too).
In practice, that often means that for consumer disputes, people in Germany either accept the loss and move on or hire a lawyer. There’s a reason why legal insurance is highly popular in Germany…
Sounds a third world post soviet country to me
Nah, the difference is that when actually hiring a lawyer, chances of settling in one’s favor increase by a lot: Basically, most companies (including banks) will just speculate that the inhibition to actually hire a lawyer is high enough that it discourages enough people to actually do so.
So the main strategy of dealing with those kind of customer cases is to a) buy time b) drag things on and c) tire down the customer.
The customer, on the other hand, needs to show reasonable effort that an a mutual agreement was not achievable and collect as much proof as possible - because then chances are quite high that the company/bank needs to pay the lawyer fees if they settle or lose the case (but most likely, they will settle because they do not want an official (and public!) judgment against them which other people in similar cases could refer to). Sometimes, a simple letter written by a lawyer can be enough to “solve” a case like that because if they receive a letter written by a lawyer, they know the customer is willing to further escalate things.
It’s a bit like playing a game of chicken: You need to make sure to show the other side that you’re willing to continue and you’re not baking down…
The issue arises if the amount involved (like in this case) is rather low: Then, finding a lawyer will be very difficult (if not impossible) because lawyer fees are based on said amount.
It’s still annoying as heck - any maybe the reason why I don’t actually think customer service in Taiwan is that bad compared to what I’m used to… 