Truth Be Told: Mutual Funds at Meezan Bank

Purpose

Today I have decided to share my bad experience with Meezan Bank’s Mutual Funds Investment only to save others the agony of dealing with them.

Background

I have been working for approx. 10 years now and am a firm believer of savings. Normally I just save in my bank account. Some time back, my Meezan bank representative got after me and convinced me to invest all my savings in Meezan bank Mutual Funds investment.

My experience

Initially I was against it but he convinced and assured me it’s all Islamic (non-interest based) and the profits are great. I got into a big debate with him that Islamic banks call it ‘profit’ and others call it ‘interest’. But he assured me that it’s such a big pool of investment that losses are really little and profits are huge. They are in no way interest.

He literally gave me a lot of charts and papers proving to me that it’ll be a worthy investment. He gave me figures that it will go up to 25% and wrote down that from this, your money in a few months will become this.

He assured me that my principal amount won’t be affected at all and I will earn profit on top of it.

I told him I don’t want high risk, high return. I just want to keep it low to medium to make sure it’s not risky. He assured me that my money is completely safe and I shouldn’t worry. I kept asking him ways how I can keep an eye on the balance. At the time of opening he promised its very simple. Once I had invested, I found out that the procedure to find out balance is so complicated that it was almost impossible for me to get balance with a full time job.

On top of that, the bearded representative started sending me very inappropriate (flirting) SMS messages. One day we went to make his complaint to the branch manager and found him staring at us too. That added to the fact that I hesitated contacting bank to find balance and we avoided going to the bank altogether.

After keeping my funds there for a year and a half, I finally made the hassle of checking with them the balance. I was shocked beyond words to know that the profit was absolutely zero. Two and a half lac rupees had also been stolen from my principal amount. I was devastated!

I called up the representative who had made all the false promises to me. He said he’s left Meezan now. It was the worst time! Only I know the hardship that I have been through to earn every rupee of that hard earned money. For them to just pinch and use up someone’s funds without their permission is outright wrong and inhumane! I headed straight to a branch closest to me in the city I was then and demanded to get my investment out immediately. Even the guy there tried his best to convince me by more false promises.

I was so angry that I started crying. (By the way remind me to do a post on why the hell that happens!) But I made sure I didn’t leave a penny’s worth in their false investment bank.

Conclusion

Only shared this story so others don’t face what I faced with this bank which for me was a big big FRAUD. The fact that I hate the most is that by calling it Islamic banking, they are not only bringing a bad name to themselves but also our religion. False promises, unjust, and no respect for women is just being faithless and un-Islamic.