BUSSELTON resident Deb Hallyburton appeared on Channel Ten’s The Project this week after a rather bizarre incident which involved a bank teller in regional Victoria freezing her bank accounts.
Ms Hallyburton recently lost her husband Brad to a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumour, which is a rare form of brain cancer.
Mr Hallyburton was diagnosed around two years ago and had undergone more than 30 courses of radiation and continuous chemotherapy during his treatment.
In May, the community rallied around the Hallyburton family raising much needed funds to access medication for Mr Hallyburton which was not available on the pharmaceutical benefit scheme.
In a cruel twist of fate after Mr Hallyburton’s death, a bank teller in regional Victoria took it upon them-self to check classifieds for deceased people and to find out whether they were NAB customers.
Ms Hallyburton said she went to withdraw cash from her bank account when she realised her account had been frozen, so went inside the branch but they could not work out what happened.
“The Busselton branch were awesome,” she said.
“They did not know what happened and registered an internal compliant, but it took NAB over a month to get back to me, that is the complaints department.
“They rang and said it was the local branch in Colac.”
Ms Hallyburton was told a person who worked at the branch would go through the local newspaper and if there were any death notices he would take it upon himself to type their name into NAB’s customer database and freeze their accounts if they were a customer of the bank.
“Apparently the person had been doing it for years,” she said.
“If they had apologised I would have stopped - but because they were going to keep on doing it and doing it to other people - I was like no, I will make sure they will not do that again.”
NAB consumer banking and wealth chief customer officer Andrew Hagger said he spoke to Ms Hallyburton and had a good conversation where he apologised for letting her family down.
Mr Hagger said he had told Ms Hallyburton that he asked for a thorough review to find out exactly what and how this occurred.
“We should have been there for her and her family providing support after the loss of her husband and I have personally apologised for any additional distress we have caused,” he said.
“NAB takes the privacy of all its customers extremely seriously and we want to ensure that this rare event does not happen again.”
Mr Hagger said in recognition of Ms Hallyburton’s poor experience with the bank and her drive to educate the community about brain cancer, NAB felt it right to offer a donation to Beanies 4 Brain Cancer.
Check out Ms Hallyburton’s appearance on The Project in the video below:
