Well, the deposit has just been credited, finally! I have no doubt that Def's kind intervention deserves the credit for making this happen today, or two and a half weeks after this supposedly real-time transaction was executed. Many thanks to Def for taking the time to help out, it's greatly appreciated!
Glad you finally got the money in the account but still IB's outsourcing of customer service that handles our personal financial information is highly irresponsible.
NOT financial trading brokerage companies and not customer service department that handles our financial transactions and money!! The only financial service that outsourced their operation to countries outside of north america that I have ever dealt with was MBNA and they only outsourced their telemarketing department that called me every single day to try to sell me their payment protection plan. And I subsequently closed my account with them and never signed up with them ever again.
For the record, we don't really know if it was outsourced or not. Couldn't it have been just a foreigner with an accent in the US?
FWIW I made two calls to IB's 877 US customer service number in the last two weeks, and all four of the reps I spoke to had very strong Indian accents. Two of them were often really hard to understand, and I lived in London for well over 20 years so I'm well used to hearing all sorts of accents and dialects. I have nothing against customer service centers based in other countries as long as I get an adequate level of service. All the customer service reps for my Chase checking account that I spoke to in the last couple of weeks, because of this deposit issue, were also based overseas in my estimation, probably in the Philippines based on their (mild) accents, but they were all extremely competent and spoke nearly perfect English. Similarly, in my recent experience, Citi's customer service center for the Macy's-branded Amex card was also based in Asia, again probably in the Philippines, and their reps were all a few notches below Chase's judging from the hoops I had to jump through in order to get a simple replacement card issued. Both Chase and Citi/Macy's had American phone reps until a few years ago.