How I got my money back with the help of AI

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ridewane

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The Card That Wouldn't Swipe​

By a South African

I found out I had been robbed because my card wouldn't swipe.

I was not an alert on my phone or a call. It was a card that declined when swiped. I phoned the bank and they put me through to fraud department. An agent told me a transaction had been flagged and thus the card was put on block. I confirmed that the transaction was genuine and legitimate, and told to let it through.

Then she asked something else:. Had I used the card overseas? As it happens, yes, I'd been in Europe in August. She asked whether I'd noticed "continuous transactions." Something in my chest changed. I opened the app and started scrolling. DeepSeek. Anthropic. Uber Eats. Uber Rides. Others. I immediately disputed them on the call, one after another, and she said she'd open an investigation.

Then I looked at the statements on my computer. The same charges were there. And more. 2026. Then 2025. Then 2024.

The same charges, sitting quietly in year after year, under merchants I had never dealt with. That's when the size of it struck me.

The bank wrote to me the same day to say the investigation would take 14 days. I wasn't going to wait 14 days.. So I did what I'd done once before on a different almost impossible task. I gave it to an AI assistant and worked through it with the AI.

I asked it to pull every statement I had, from folders scattered across my machine, into one chronological folder. Then to find the suspicious transactions and tell me how far back it went. It came back with a date of 2024. Then I asked for a reconciliation, but it warned me that it didn't have all the statements it needed. So I asked it to tell me exactly which were missing, and requested those from the bank.

Then the part nobody mentions: the cleanup. The AI had flagged things that were genuinely mine including real DeepSeek charges on a legitimate account. I was going to be careful not to claim a single item that was really mine as a false claim, even an innocent one, would hand the bank the high ground. So we (the AI and I) reconciled the real charges out, one by one, and I went through everything left by hand.

What remained had a signature which was the same amount repeated, day after day, sometimes three or four in a day. Small enough each time to slip past a person. Together, from February to September 2026, 172 unauthorised transactions on one card at just over R38,000.

The 14 days

After finalising their investigation with my evidence I provided, the bank refunded R24,639.99 and recorded, on their own document, "Customer loss: R00.00". Fraud investigation closed.

I didn't let it go. I had the AI reconcile their refund against my records. That left roughly 90 transactions, about R16,900, unaccounted for which i sent back to them disputing the final amount.

The bank phoned and asked me to highlight each disputed item on every statement and to email it when done. Doing this by hand was going to be a nightmare. It meant I had to open all the relevant statements, find,the relevant transactions and then highlight it then scan all those statements to be emailed. Instead I I set the AI the task to fetch every statement where the disputed items appear, highlight each one and save it to a folder. The AI took about five minutes. I sent it to the bank within an hour after the call.

R1,053.99

The bank replied and declined to uphold the complaint and instead offered me R1,053.99 against a shortfall of about R15,900. I immediately started drafting a dispute letter escalating to the next level. I had a meeting scheduled and was going to complete the dispute to send to them after the meeting.

After the meeting I went back to my email and saw a new email fro the bank to ignore the previous letter stating that they will pay the outstanding R15,419.24.

I felt happy. Not vindicated, just glad to have my money back.

So, a few questions for this community:

  • Has anyone else fought a bank over card fraud? How did it go for you?
  • To those who work in banking, payments or fraud: why do patterns like 20+ near-identical foreign charges, or the same amounts day after day, not trip an automatic block long before a customer notices?
  • And the honest one: have you used AI for something you were convinced you couldn't do on your own? Where did it actually help and where did it waste your time?
I'm happy to go into the method in more detail if anyone wants it.
 
The FNB "private banker" is actually an AI bot so you can get it to do all this directly from the chat window.

I was querying outstanding authorisations on my credit card and I got it to list everything that was unbanked (usually you can't see this).
Its pretty cool. I don't know how long it will be before they lock this down though.
 
AI story with AI stuff.

I may be very very wrong, but as far as I know a bank won't refund you for transactions in 2024/2025.. so best you get your agent to go check the rules from your bank about disputes before making up stuff again.
 
ridewane said:
  • To those who work in banking, payments or fraud: why do patterns like 20+ near-identical foreign charges, or the same amounts day after day, not trip an automatic block long before a customer notices?
Click to expand...

I don't know...probably all the same reasons you as a REAL PERSON completely ignored them day after day, month after month, year after year?
 
Ecco said:
No alerts for transactions, and you didnt check your account statement in years - thats all on you mate.
Click to expand...
Clearly one of them noveau riche BB-BEE beneficiaries... too rich and too dom to notice.. until the card is maxed out or blocked for fraud.
 
Fair point, and honestly that's the point I was trying to make.

For two years nothing caught this — no fraud alert, no call from the bank. I only found out because my card wouldn't swipe at my desk one morning. So the "negative" isn't the story; it's the setup. The system simply wasn't watching out for me.

The story is the other half: with tools that are available to anyone right now, I did in an afternoon what the bank told me would take them 14 days — twice. No tech background. Just described the problem, worked through it, and ended up with a reconciliation solid enough that the bank reversed itself and paid. That's what's achievable today — and it's the part worth talking about.

The tools don't care whether you think of yourself as "technical." If you can describe the problem clearly, you can use them. That's the shift.
 
airborne said:
172 and you didn't notice a single one, yeah that sounds fully legit
Click to expand...
Fair challenge, and I'd have thought the same. But it wasn't 172 at once — that's the total across roughly seven months, February to September, and the bulk were small. Most were around R175. A single R175 line sitting in a statement full of real spending doesn't scream at you.

And it blended in because there was real spending next to it. I was in Europe in August on that card. I had a genuine DeepSeek account. There were real Uber charges. So the fraud wasn't alone on the statement — it was hidden among things that were actually mine. That's how it went unnoticed, and it's exactly why reconciling it took work: I had to separate the real ones from the fakes.

Where I do agree with you: 172 charges should never have been up to me to find. The near-identical amounts, repeating day after day — that's a pattern a bank's monitoring should catch long before a customer does. It didn't. I only found out because my card stopped swiping.

So it's not that I wasn't paying attention. It's that the number was designed to sit just under the threshold where you'd notice one of them. Add them up, though, and it's over R38k.
 
ridewane said:
Fair point, and honestly that's the point I was trying to make.

For two years nothing caught this — no fraud alert, no call from the bank. I only found out because my card wouldn't swipe at my desk one morning. So the "negative" isn't the story; it's the setup. The system simply wasn't watching out for me.

The story is the other half: with tools that are available to anyone right now, I did in an afternoon what the bank told me would take them 14 days — twice. No tech background. Just described the problem, worked through it, and ended up with a reconciliation solid enough that the bank reversed itself and paid. That's what's achievable today — and it's the part worth talking about.

The tools don't care whether you think of yourself as "technical." If you can describe the problem clearly, you can use them. That's the shift.
Click to expand...
ridewane said:
Fair point, and honestly that's the point I was trying to make.

For two years nothing caught this — no fraud alert, no call from the bank. I only found out because my card wouldn't swipe at my desk one morning. So the "negative" isn't the story; it's the setup. The system simply wasn't watching out for me.

The story is the other half: with tools that are available to anyone right now, I did in an afternoon what the bank told me would take them 14 days — twice. No tech background. Just described the problem, worked through it, and ended up with a reconciliation solid enough that the bank reversed itself and paid. That's what's achievable today — and it's the part worth talking about.

The tools don't care whether you think of yourself as "technical." If you can describe the problem clearly, you can use them. That's the shift.
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Ettiene, appreciate the like. 🙏

You've got the whole point of the post exactly right: it's not really a story about a bank — it's to show that an ordinary person, with the tools that are already available to anyone right now, can take on a bank and win. I'm not technical, I'm not a fraud investigator. I just refused to let a "no" that didn't add up be the end of it.

If a post like this helps even one person realise they don't have to accept being short-changed, then it did its job.
 
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