I don’t have a bank account or credit card with HSBC and I never will. Here’s why:

A little more than a year ago, I moved into my new house. For some reason, the previous owner didn’t set up mail forwarding, so I continued to receive her mail. I wrote “Moved” on each piece of her mail and dropped it into the mailbox, and gradually I stopped receiving her mail.

Except for her mail from HSBC.

I’ve returned a year’s worth of bank statements, credit card pre-approvals and who knows what else to HSBC, each envelope with a “Moved” message on it. I’ve even ripped open the little plastic windows to write “Moved” on the statements themselves, because maybe the staff at HSBC aren’t looking at the envelopes. But the mail from HSBC keeps coming.

I’ve never opened any of the envelopes to see what they contain, but it’s obvious that they hold this woman’s financial information. And HSBC doesn’t seem to have any system in place to stop sending their clients’ financial information out to wrong addresses, even when alerted to the fact they’re sharing sensitive data with whoever wants it.

Which makes me wonder what level of banking and credit card fraud they have. And what level of security they have on their online sites, as security clearly isn’t a priority for their physical mail.

There’s no way I’d trust HSBC with my money. If you’ve got an account with them, I’d strongly suggest taking your funds out of it, before a stranger beats you to it.