This was clearly tampered with,' Levy-Bencheton said.
'The reason you have a safety deposit box is to specifically put things in a very safe place and not to be tampered with. 'Once it is gone, it's gone,' said Suraj Khatiwada. Go Public also spoke to an Edmonton man who lost thousands of dollars' worth of irreplaceable 22-karat gold jewelry, who says the bank did the same thing to him. It says its policies require the contents to be set aside for safe keeping.īut Levy-Bencheton says she's still missing her family's most valued possessions and fighting for compensation.Īnd she's not the only one. The bank drilled open and emptied thousands of safety deposit boxes across the country in 2012 in an effort to get rid of those no longer being used or paid for. The Toronto woman went to TD Canada Trust to empty the box a few months later, and discovered the bank had already done it years ago - forcing it open by drilling the lock then emptying the contents. That's until her dad passed away in 2017 at age 103.
If there's one thing Sheila Levy-Bencheton took for granted, it's that the safety deposit box her father rented from a big bank was secure.
