Job Discussion Forums

[cassimira]

Hi everyone!

Sorry if this topic has been posted on before, but I turned up nothing helpful when I did a forum search.

My boyfriend and I have been accepted to train in the CELTA course though IHBangkok in October. We're very excited, and everything is going well paperwork-wise.... EXCEPT....

They keep telling us they haven't gotten our money, but our banks are claiming that they have.

Both of of instituted a wire transfer for the full amount of the course from our respective banks over 3 weeks ago. We've even instituted a wire trace on one of the accounts, which indicated that the money had been received. We've sent them the wire transfer receipts and all the bank documents we could get our not-so-grubby little hands on. We've given them exact information as to the amount actually received (turned out there were some fees tacked on at the end... nice of our banks to tell us about that, eh?).

To no avail.

They simply keep saying that their bank (a branch of Bangkok bank) has not yet received the money, and ask us for a copy of the "SWIFT MT 103." Which our banks cannot and will not provide to us... only to other banks because of the sensitive nature of the information on said document.

ack, ack, ack.... what do we do now?

Has anyone else had this problem with ihBangkok or any other institution? We are fairly positive that it was actually ihBangkok that we wired the money to, as we linked to it through the Cambridge website, and research has turned up no rumors of a scam related to this. We have double, nay, QUADRUPLE-checked the account information.

Any advice on what we could do to resolve this situtation? We're getting a bit nervous as the date approaches.

Also, should we have gone another route to transfer the money? From CELTA's reaction, it seems that they don't typically encounter this problem.

Thanks again, ya'll,
Cassimira

[MaiPenRai]

When I did my CELTA with IH in Bangkok, there were 2 students in my class who experienced problems wih payments. Both were eventually sorted out, but only after a lot of pestering by the students. If you have some written clarification from your bank that the money has been received, then there is obvioulsy a problem on the Thai side of things (what a surprise...lol).

You say you did a wire trace that shows the money was received...did you send/scan that info to IH yet?

With wire transfers there is always a small chance of the money ending up in "limbo" somewhere out there in internet land. Seems like you are doing the right things so far. Try to pressure IH in Bangkok to keep on Bangkok Bank. You are paying them after all, so it is their money now really. make sure you are speaking to the right person as well and not some new receptionist. At this point, I would definitely ask to speak with the person in charge at IH in Bangkok. Danny is his name if I recall. Try to find out which exact branch you transferred to, as sometimes banks here seem to be clueless about what other branches of the same bank are doing.

All this being said, the actual course at IH Bangkok is easily one of the best CELTA/TEFL courses in Thailand.

Good luck

[cassimira]

yeah, I eventually had to get my banker directly involved. But I have to say, that one e-mail he sent directly from the bank sure worked its magic.

You were right, they had it, it just took a lot of perseverance to get them to match it to our names.


Nice to know we weren't the only ones, though!

Thanks for your response, it helped.