"I lost £193,000 but the bank offered me £25 in compensation"

[chomalungma]

www.theguardian.com/money/2019/dec/07/i-lost-my-193000-inheritance-with-one-wrong-digit-on-my-sort-code

I don't even know where to start with this.
A solicitor was sending an inheritance to a client. The client gave the right details, but the wrong sort code.

The bank transferred the money. The mistake was realised but the bank was unable to get the money back and the person who got it started spreading it around and refused to refund it,

Turns out that one of the solutions is to ensure that the name matches the account as well. This is all to do with bank transfer fraud.
This won't happen until March next year.

In the meantime, he went to court to force the bank to reveal the name of the customer. Barclays fought it - but eventually they had to. He did eventually get the money from the customer via the court.

The bank refused to pay the legal fees for what the client had to do. But when contacted by the Guardian, they did. All £46,000 of them.

It's too easy to make transfer errors - even if you check carefully. Banks should check carefully to ensure that the bank account is the same name as expected and there should be a system if money is put in the wrong account and the bank knows there's been an error.

The way banks operate on this really is out of date. Now that electronic bank transfers are the norm with people doing their own transactions online there really needs to be some kind of protection against innocent mistakes.

I once had £2000 transferred from my account. The bank cashier put in the wrong sort code without me noticing. I only realised that a mistake had been made when the person who was due the money contacted me to ask where their money was. Thankfully the sort code entered hadn't matched with any other account and the money pinged back to me. It was a very stressful phone call trying to find out if some random person had just had my £2000 of my money added to their account.

This is the exact reason that when I got my inheritance I asked for a cheque instead of a bank transfer, like the solitor tried to get me to do. In the bank I refused to use a machine like an assistant tried to get me to do & instead queued up for ages to give the cheque along with my bank card to an actual person. They swiped my card, they swiped my cheque and the money went into my account. Maybe I'm overly cautious, but when you hear stories like the above, I'm happy to be overly cautious.

I nearly had a nightmare scenario like that recently.... I misread the sort (someone had type a 0 instead of an 8 on the email, and it was so similar my brain read it as the right number) with all the money coming from an inheritence (and a not dissimilar sum) and I only realised after it had been sent

After a rather sleepless night, I found out from the solicitors it had bounced back to their account.

NB, regarding name checks - they were going to introduce it this year, but it hasn't happened yet as banks aren't ready. I expressed surprise about what the difficulty could be to DH, who is in software, and he pointed out there are quite a lot of complications involved. But hopefully it will be sorted by March - they've introduced it mainly to fight fraud where people intercept transfers and add new accounts; easier when the names don't have to match.

This is crazy.
I am a disabled woman who relies on benefits, and after a massive bank fuck up a few years ago I found out I can't stop enormous sums of money being paid into my account without my consent.
If that did happen, my benefits would stop, and I would be fucked. I could end up homeless.

It’s crazy that people can nearly get away with keeping the money. If this bloke hadn’t been able to afford solicitors fees to force the bank to do stuff then this person may have got away with stealing 193k.

I had to pay my brother a substantial sum of money once via bank transfer and I initially transferred £1 and he made sure he had it and then I did the rest.

what do you mean? When do you ever have to give an address to send a payment?

I wanted to make two large payments recently and decided to go into the branch so they could see my ID and documentation, which would make the head office checks easier to authorise. I had to give the recipients' names, sort codes and bank account numbers plus their residential addresses including full postcodes. The transactions couldn't be done at the counter, I was taken to a separate area.

I had sent small test amounts to the accounts previously and asked the cashier to verify that the details I was giving for these transfers matched the accounts previously sent to. I also then had to sign detailed print outs for each transaction and was given a copy of each to keep. This was from a Nationwide current account.

The case mentioned here is awful, however, the gentleman in question should've taken much more care with giving his details to his solicitor in the first place. If he hadn't made the initial error he would've been spared a lot of grief and hassle.

I would have thought that the other customer keeping the money might have come under the definition of theft - "the dishonest appropriation of the property of another, with the intention to deprive them of it permanently". If so, it would have been easier to get the police to deal with it, perhaps, and a lot less expensive. Glad it turned out as well as it did, though it needed the intervention of the Guardian.

I went In the bank to pay a few thousand pounds into my husband account at Lloyd’s

The bank clerk couldn’t tell me that the sort code and account number that I had matched my DH name is I didn’t pay it in
Now when I want to pay anything to any account I send over £1 and get the person who I’m sending it to to confirm they have received the amount and screen shot the amount paid in and send that to me before I send any larger amounts

Personally I prefer to pay money into my account at the post office rather than the bank much easier and quicker than those stupid self payment machines

What kind of a dishonest degenerate shit bag keeps that kind of money for themselves, KNOWING full well that it's not theirs?

Also re the bank asking for "permission" to reclaim the incorrectly appropriated funds, when the WRONG NAME should have alerted them to the error in the first place....words fail me.

Frightening to think how fast and lose they play with other peoples' money.

Glad he got it resolved, but how shitty he had to go through all this so, especially given that the money came via the loss of his father.

Makes the other parties (Barclays and the other thieving customer) appear even more cunty.

Customer gave wrong details. Bank performed CHAPS payment, as at that amount it will be CHAPS payment. There's a charge for CHAPS, about £30, so possible this £25 offered by bank was simply fee refund. If money were sent to other bank, sender has no legal way to recover this money. The only way they can do it , is to inform receiving bank about this what happened. However, other bank can't act just on other bank word alone, has to have evidence. Bank can't see receiving person details on the screen, as they can't access other banks details, that would be breach of privacy. They can only look into their own customers details, but even then only for good reasons. To recover this money, bank has to have police order to do so. But police will only act for judge's order, so charges are needed. But person, who received money , didn't do anything wrong. They're not a thieves, as they didn't steal it, money were sent to their account. There're no fraudsters either, they didn't intend to flee someone . In the end , it's a customer fault for not giving right details in the first place. But it's easier to blame this horrible banks rather then acknowledge their own mistake.

Oh that was my biggest fear when I was waiting on my inheritance, and Tgen transferring it into my sisters account. I must have checked it and got it verified about a quadrillion times.
The other Customer refused to send the money back. In my book that was attempted theft. Why weren’t they prosecuted. Why should he have had to resort to going to the courts to get “his own inheritance, that his father probably broke his back working for. Why is refusing even an option.

Funny Barclays decided to move when he went to the Papers.

When I say attempted theft. I recognise that he didn’t put the money in his own bank, but finding it there and actually refusing to hand it back is still theft in my book

About 15 years ago I had £792 appear in my bank account. No idea where it came from. Phoned Barclays (before internet banking was really a thing) and they assured me it was my money. I reiterated I was expecting no money and asked them where it had come from. All they could tell me it was a cheque paid in over the counter at a particular branch. Could not tell me who had paid it. Made this call a couple of times over a few weeks but same message from Barclays.

I left it sitting in my account for ages worried that if I spent it someone would come looking for it. Never heard another peep out of them and eventually after several months I decided there was nothing I could do so it got spent. Always felt a little guilty but I did try my best!

Surely it should be possible given that sort code plus account code is around 15 digits to ensure that all bank accounts are different by at least 2 digits? Because human mistakes are to be expected and it's a very poor system that expects h7mans to behave as machines. And check the name as well.

I have a Dragons Den type idea that every bank should be made to offer a way to securely transmit account information, to prepopulate the fields for someone sending money to a new account. Like a fancy copy/paste.

If the onus was on them to fill in the info I bet they'd be able to trace and freeze erroneous transfers a lot faster.

It is illegal to keep money that has been sent to your account inadvertently

But the legal owner can only act on this if they know who you are. The bank refused to disclose the illegal recipient. That's why he had to go to court at great expense. The law needs to be changed to compel the bank to disclose the name.

Surely it should be possible given that sort code plus account code is around 15 digits to ensure that all bank accounts are different by at least 2 digits?

If only! The problem is that millions of computer systems would need to be reprogrammed to accept extra digits. Not a small job.

Disgusting of Barclays. The trauma they caused. They only paid back his £46k legal fees begrudgingly!

The law needs to be changed to compel the bank to disclose the name

I don't see why the bank can't contact the police - who can then investigate. I would hope that the police turning up - and there being no evidence that the money is legally theres - and plenty of evidence that it should have gone to someone else - would be enough to get people to return the money.

Jaxhog
IBAN numbers already comprise the six digit sort code and the eight digit account number.

Barclays were at fault by having two accounts with the same number

they should be hauled over by the regulators for such a crass failure

Wasn't there a case where someone was prosecuted for picking up a £20 in a supermarket.

They knew the money wasn't theirs so shouldn't have kept it?

How is this different?

I'm staggered that the person who gave the wrong details didn't bother checking them. If I was getting almost-£200k transferred time me, I'd be checking the details I'd given bloody loads of times!

What happened next is wrong, but with something this important, the person giving the wrong info was daft in the extreme.

Dishonestly retaining a wrongful credit IS theft, @Turefu.

Since the solicitor remortgaging our house can get my surname and middle name right, and is trying to charge us to change the Land Registry records unnecessarily, this story does not surprise me.

I also always transfer a token amount as a test before a large amount.

Slightly different but I didn’t notice that someone else kindly (and accidentally) paid our mortgage for 4 months. No mortgage payments came out of our current account during that time. I noticed we had more in our account than I’d expected but we had just moved house and money had been flying around everywhere so I just thought I’d miscalculated moving costs. I saw that our mortgage was being paid as I double checked the amount being paid in as it changed with the house move.

The bank was certainly very fast to reverse the payments then, and didn’t tell us what had happened. The first I knew about it was when I received a letter saying we were in collections for our mortgage - triggered once the 4 months of payments were reversed. Slightly stressful.

The bank were very stroppy initially and kept insisting I had given the incorrect details and it was totally my fault and they would not reverse late payment charges, credit line closures, or reporting of being in collections. This is despite me paying the 4 months of mortgage payments immediately.

Luckily it was totally their fault and they were very apologetic when they realised that! All charges were dropped and they gave me £150 as an apology.