Once a friend from Ukraine asked me to help her with the closing of the account in the Polish bank Pecao.
She was not going to go to Poland and therefore could not visit the bank, so I started correspondence with employees by email, which was specified in the contract, and also is on the official website.
In the first message, I asked how you can close the bank account and the employee replied that you need to visit the bank for this, but you can also write a written request and send it along with the bank card by the postal service to the bank branch where the account was opened.
Fortunately, the contract and the card was on hand, so I wrote an appeal at the end of which my friend left a signature.
In the letter I indicated the customer number, account number, phone number used when opening the account and was not on the network, the return email for a quick reply.
The letter was sent by the cheapest land delivery through Ukrposhta, the delivery cost was about $4.
The letter had a track number on which it was possible to track the delivery, after waiting a couple of weeks I saw that the letter was delivered to the bank, but there was no answer to the email.
Having written the next message on the email, asked if the account was closed, to which the representative of the bank replied that he had requested this information from that branch of the bank and a little later said that the account had accumulated a debt for servicing the card. The card was not used for about 6 months, it left about $2 and the bank allegedly wrote off the amount for servicing the card. In the agreement on this there is a clause that informs that in the absence of funds on the card a certain amount for service will be written off, probably $2 for the bank is not money.
In general, if you translate from Polish zlotys into dollars, the amount of debt was about $15. I asked the bank employee for the SWIFT payment details and sent this amount to the account of my friend, and I paid in addition about $12 for the transfer commission. I reported on the sending to the bank employee, to which he replied that the account would be closed at the end of the month on the 30th.
Here is a list of the required data to perform a SWIFT transfer to an account in Pecao Bank:
-imie i nazwisko osoby na rzecz, ktorej ma byc dokonany przelew,
-dokladny adres zamieszkania osoby na rzecz, ktorej ma byc dokonany przelew,
-nazwa banku i adres, do ktorego ma byc dokonany przelew ( Bank Pekao S.A. lub Bank Polska Kasa Opieki S.A.),
-pelny numer rachunku odbiorcy IBAN ( 26-cyfrowy, przed numerem nalezy wstawic litery PL),
-kod Banku tzw. kod-SWIFT: PKOPPLPW (BIC) -jednakowy dla wszystkich klientow.
Next month I wrote an email on the question of whether the account was closed, to which the bank employee replied that he was closed.
From this I will conclude that you can not open accounts with banks that charge money for account maintenance and you can not just leave empty accounts in different countries, since they can then be omitted from other countries under customs control if there are debts or loans in banks.