We all know that our ‘caring’, ‘customer-friendly’ banks will do or say anything to get hold of our money. But HSBC seem to have taken greed, lying and mis-selling to a whole new level. For almost 20 years, HSBC eagerly sold longer-term (5 years or more) stockmarket bonds to elderly customers (average age 83) in the full knowledge that many would not live long enough to see their bonds mature. Some even had terminal cancers. But the HSBC salespeople and senior managers couldn’t give a toss. When many customers died, their heirs had to pay huge penalties to HSBC for cashing in their bonds ‘early’. But each time an HSBC salesperson sold one of these bonds they pocketed 10,000 pounds in commission.
Banks like HSBC often refer to the vulnerable elderly as the “banana skin and grave brigade”, because they have one foot on a financial banana skin (they don’t know much about savings and investments) and one foot in the grave. But the banana skin and grave brigade often have large savings and so are wonderful targets for hungry HSBC bankers. Hence HSBC’s enthusiastic attempts to cheat many thousands out of much of their life savings. An HSBC speciality was trawling old-age homes for victims to cheat. The elderly may have lost a lot of money, but HSBC’s profits were very healthy.
So, if you have any elderly relatives – don’t be embarrassed, talk to them about where they have put their savings, find out who is trying to get hold of their money by offering supposed “financial advice” and protect them against the greedy, lying, predatory staff at banks like HSBC