Does anyone work for Royal Mail and can give some advice ?

[0lga]

I’ve in the process of divorcing my husband who has a history of lying and hiding money.

I’ve found some suspicious transactions in our joint bank account statements which I don’t recognise. I’ve asked the bank and they don’t know what they are either.

Its a series of 14 x debit card purchases , for £100 exactly , marked in the statement as

“ WWW. ROYALMAIL.COM INTERNET GB”.

There is also the date and a four digit code which looks like the time but is in the same in all of them so it might be a branch code.

Does anyone know what they might be?

Im assuming it’s not cash line as they are marked C/L on the bank statements and these are POS ( point of sale ) which is a debit card transaction.

I do t know about the transactions but on my bank statement the 4 digits are sometimes the last 4 numbers of my debit card. Would that make sense?

Thanks for the suggestion but I don’t think that’s it. Because there is a different number for other transaction.

Can be buying coins

@worldwidetravel2017 can you say more about that please? Do you mean some sort of memorial coins ?

Royal Mail have a shop which sells stamps, coins, medals etc
shop.royalmail.com/postage-and-packaging/first-and-second-class-stamps?p=2

Does he have his own business that sends letters out regularly? A sheet of second class stamps costs £45 and a sheet of 1st class stamps is £55. Together that's £100.

Oh it could be gold, they sell virtual gold now. You can buy an exact amount of money rather than by weight.

Plus it's .com so can you get into his royal mail account on the computer to see?

He does have his own business. But all the work costs are put costs put on the work account by one of his staff, never through our joint account.

Also these transactions are all a few days apart and there’s 14 of them, all for £100. That’s why they caught my eye .

I thought that if you paid for things like stamps or postage it came up on your statement as “ post office counters “, that’s why I was confused by the Royal Mail .

Is it not cash ? As in using the post office counter as a cash point ?

No that is an online transaction reference

You can get the explanation, information and documentary evidence to prove it by going through the divorce process and using 1. questionnaires and 2. deficiencies - and if still lacking 3. a solicitor's letter and after that 4. a court order for it. (quick side point - do also focus on pensions, stocks and shares, inheritances past and future, business accounts etc).

As part of the divorce proceedings / financial aspect each party must provide full and frank financial disclosure. (Look at Form E, it requires full disclosure and shows parties what information is required for example pensions which can in some cases be more valuable than the former martial home btw).

Once bank statements/financial information has been shared each party can submit questionnaires - questions and importantly requests for documentary evidence about transactions, for example.

Once answers to these questionnaires are received, a further questionnaire (usually called Deficiencies) can be sent to each party about deficiencies - things that are not answered / need more detail or require documentary evidence.

If these two processes do not provide the information required, a solicitor's letter can be sent to a party to request the information, explanation and documentary evidence.

If the solicitor's letter does not result in compliance, and the information and evidence is still outstanding a court order can be applied for to get it.

FYI - pensions are often overlooked to the detriment of women's furniture finances. If there are pensions, ask for a CETV for each - cash equivalent transfer - as these can be requested from pension providers and in event of divorce proceedings they must provide them. Also consider getting a PODE (pensions on divorce expert report) - this tells parties how much the pension is worth in more detail and can set out how much each party will get on retirement. It can include different retirement ages for each party, and be based on percentages eg what 50/50 or 60/40 would result in. It can give the outcome for a capital share and income share - what income each party would get from a 50/50 split for example.

^future finances (not furniture finances - typo :)

@voice2 thank you for your very detailed post. However I do not live in England and so there is no Form E process.

My H has not disclosed what I believe to be most of his pensions and although my solicitor has written to his asking for them, we are no further on. He has not even disclosed what was in his bank accounts , claiming that he can’t get bank statements.

This is why I was so pleased to have found bank statements that he had discarded - I was looking for clues as to the location of assets and was shocked to find what I thought was debt.

And yes you are quite right about the value of pensions - his are around 4 times the value of the marital home . The problem is locating them. He has disclosed less than 25%.

As I understand it, a court order needs to be specific to a pension provider, so if I don’t know where it is that won’t work.

Thanks that’s a good idea but he’s very clever about passwords and uses system generated ones , so I can’t hack into anything.

Don’t ask me how I know 🫤

A court order can be specific to one of the parties - it can compel them to provide information (or they will be in contempt of court). So in a request for a court order one party could ask that the court compel the other party to give the name of each pension provider and provide a cash equivalent transfer value for each.

No probs. He might have let the computer save the password for the royal mail website though.
If so, you just open up the website, click to log in and it might open up the account.

You could also email the royal mail website help email address. Telling them the transaction details. They will be able to look up the transaction and tell you what it was for. As it's a joint account you have the right to know what was processed. The website will be able to investigate this for you
Screenshot/ photograph the exact transaction references, date and times.

Sorry I'm wrong. That's the royal mint selling gold not royal mail.
I've had a look at the royal mail website and there's nothing I can see at exactly £100. So I do think you should go onto their website enquiry form and ask them to investigate

business.help.royalmail.com/app/webforms/stampsenquiries

Sadly the account doesn’t open up for me and I had no luck with any passwords I’ve ever known.

I tried asking for purchase details from another organisation before , as the investments were also paid for from the joint account. But they said they couldn't tell me anything, because the account on their website was in DH name only using his email address. The debit card also has his name on it.

So as far as they are concerned it’s his card in his name and his email address so it’s his purchase . GDPR etc.

But thanks for trying to help me.

Oh dammit I'm so sorry

Are you in Scotland?
If you the debt on your joint account is also owed by you. Not in an English joint bank account. Yep I learnt that the hard way.

He has provided the CETV for several ( relatively ) small pensions . He says that’s all he has.

Solictor says that I can’t get a court order to ask him to disclose unless I know the name of the provider.

So if I ask his to disclose his pension with eg standard life and his is actually with Fidelity, he can come back and say that he doesn’t have a standard life pension. And he will have complied with the terms of the order.

it’s very frustrating, he seems to be running rings around the solicitors.

Yes I am.

Theres no debt on the joint bank account , it’s just that I can see huge sums that have gone out to credit cards in the past. Joint account is now frozen to stop him maxing out the over draft.

sorry to hear you’ve been burned by this too .