To be confused by the rude email

[Farontothemaddingcrowd]

I got married in a lovely church on the 19th and the ceremony was beautiful. 4 days before the wedding we received the invoice through the post with details of how to pay by cheque. The invoice did say that payment should be made prior to the wedding. As we don’t use cheques, dp (now DH) contacted the church treasurer to ask for the bank details. He emailed them over and said that he would amend the invoice. This was on the 16th. DH wanted to confirm the bank details before we sent the transfer over (as a fraud protection measure- as emails can be intercepted etc) so we waited for the invoice to arrive. Nothing further was mentioned and we had the ceremony, a short honeymoon followed immediately by Christmas.
On Boxing Day DH emailed the church as we hadn’t received a new invoice, asking if we could confirm verbally the details for payment. The vicar responded to say that this should have been paid before the wedding and that we could drop cash off at the rectory. DH explained that we had only actually received the invoice on the 15th and we had requested a new invoice as we wanted confirmation of the bank details. As the church wanted payment we transferred the money there and then.

The church treasurer has emailed to say he had needed to ‘calm down’ because he was so angry. He insinuated that we were ridiculous to want verbal or posted confirmation of the bank details and said that he had never agreed to send a new invoice out. He said it was unreasonable that we had taken ten days to pay (those ten days included our wedding, honeymoon and Christmas). He said that his son was Vice President of cyber security for a bank and we did not need to confirm the bank details in an email. His tone was really abrupt and I was really upset tbh, we were happy to pay well in advance, but the church sent the invoice out very late, with incorrect details. We made a payment when WE chased it on Boxing Day and that payment would have cleared faster than a cheque would have done.
AIBU to think we should have had longer to pay an invoice - the invoice arrived on the 15th and we didn’t have the bank details emailed until the day after and we were then waiting for the amended email to arrive. I don’t know if I’ve explained it very well - but I feel like the unnecessarily rude tone, when we’ve now already paid, is upsetting and casts a shadow over a lovely day. DH works for a bank and is probably extra cautious regarding cyber security but I think he was right to ask for verbal or posted confirmation before we sent over a large amount of money.

You absolutely need to double check bank details from an email. We have just lost £1500 to a scam emailer claiming to be our plumber. Bank refuses to refund, making our new bathroom more expensive than expected.

YANBU. They said they'd amend the invoice; to me that means sending out another.

We have a long connection to the parish but I didn’t see that as relevant. The church warden’s son grew up with my DH and he grew up in the parish.

Oooo.

You get to write DH.

Congratulations on your wedding!

Yeh you should have sorted it out beforehand. You knew when it was due

There was a misunderstanding. Perhaps you could have handled it better, and the church should understand lots of people don’t have cheque books anymore.

You have apologised, they didn’t handle it with grace. Time to move on.

Congratulations on your wedding and marriage OP! I hope it was a lovely day.

As somebody who works in infosec, you were right, they were wrong.

Also, does anybody even have a cheque book any more?

Still, what's done is done. Be assured you've paid your debts and move on.

I would always expect to be able to confirm bank details over the phone when paying a large sum of money. Anyone who doesn’t needs to wake up to the fraud they’re putting themselves at risk of. That said better systems are now in place with the banks cross checking account names & numbers but it’s still not fool proof. I’m with you, just ignore and move on though!

Thank you all for the congratulations and yes it is so strange getting to write DH now!

I think if you get married in an events venue with a professional organisation you can expect a normal level of office admin behavior. If you get married in a parish church mostly run by volunteers you have to understand this will not be the case.

I have experience with a church with a very antiquated way of doing things(rural, picturesque but slow) and I can well see something like that occurring there. I would guess my mum is the youngest congregant and she is over 70. The average age of the choir is in the 80's!They think email is a racy newfangled thing they try not to toy with. They have an answerphone in the church office that is checked infrequently if at all. People do tend to use cash or cheques in such circumstances. If you had paid by bank transfer I should think they would not even know until a postal bank statement arrived.

I don't know what the £620 covered but at the church I am familiar with some of this would have been payment for caretaker locking and unlocking the church/organist/Bell ringer/choir in non covid times.... If you pay by cheque, the cheque would be paid in, and the same amount of cash would be withdrawn and put in an envelope with the wedding name/date on... If you pay cash it would likewise be kept and on the day of the wedding the envelope would have be opened in the vestry and divided up there and then and some of them might actually be relying on this money for the coming week, particularly in the lead up to xmas.

It would cause real problems there to not have the cash to hand on the day, and I suspect this might be what happened here.

www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-23/business-email-scam-tradies-computer-hacked-costs-51000/12817584

In Australia, but this is what can happen. Sorry this happened around your wedding, I would do my very best to put it behind me.

I work for an FS company received an email from a client saying " hi just back from hold, all in the right tone and relevant, gave new bank details for a £20k withdrawal"

Standard practise to call the client to confirm new details, the client didn't have a clue! Never pay money to an unverified account,

[quote WhereverIGoddamnLike]@SarahAndQuack

The church is very much a business. Only an idiot would think otherwise.

They wax about the evils of zero-hour contracts, but they hire staff and give them zero hour contracts. They drag Amazon through the mud for paying tiny taxes, yet they have massive investments in Amazon in order to grow their wealth. I could go on if you like?

The church may do a lot of good with their money, but they are a giant business and the are not always ethical or upfront about what they do.[/quote]
Well, count me an idiot, then - me and other people who donate their time.

I understand your scepticism, and I share it - I can get very angry about the way the C of E acts as a landowner and landlord, for example.

But on the level of an individual parish asking for payment of a cheque, it will not be people acting as part of a business. It will be volunteers. It will likely be ordinary people who know their church may well be out of pocket after a wedding, even if the money owed is paid in time. Those ordinary people are nowhere near the group that choose to invest in Amazon or not, and it is silly to treat them as if they were.

Wow, so much wasted emotion over a paid invoice. I couldn’t muster half as much anger even if you failed to pay completely.

Bizarre, but the church treasurer is clearly finding life a little overwhelming. It’s not you, it’s him. Leave him to it.

Congratulations on your marriage

I think they were at fault not to have given you the bank details in the first place so you could transfer the payment via on-line banking. Who under the age of about 85 uses cheques these days?

I always do a test payment of a small amount to confirm I have the right account details.

HTH.

@SarahAndQuack

It is individual churches which advertise positions on zero hour contracts because, as a business, that is best for them. It isnt for the employee but, as a business, that doesnt really matter as much.

As I said, the church may do good as well and yes, they have volunteers but they are a business. Pretending they are not is disingenuous.

@Russell19

You are right OP. No need for rudeness and it doesn't sound very Christian like either.

Tbh I disagree with paying for the Sacraments anyway. Should be donations in my opinion.

I think churches are better placed to calculate the cost of providing their services than joe and Jenny bloggs who turn up for 6 weeks before asking if they can marry there.

If you don’t place any value on the service then the cost won’t affect you as you won’t have any interest in using the service, right?

Yanbu OP. A friend of mine paid an invoice emailed to him by a tradesman. Neither of them knew the email had been hacked and the sort code and bank account numbers changed. My friend ended up paying £2k to a fraudster in good faith, thinking it was going to the tradesmen. You were right to be cautious and it sounds like the church treasurer has dealt with this poorly. Try and put it out your mind and move on.

There's a lot of people on this thread who live in an idealistic world. Invoice fraud via email DOES happen. And church representatives ARE sometimes difficult to get hold of. Our administrator at my church is available on the phone on Tuesday and Thursday mornings or leave a voicemail. I did that several times before I just had to rock up at the presbytery to get the forms for DD1's baptism. So I believe the OP that getting through to the treasurer wasn't easy and she thought waiting for the reissued invoice with the bank details on would be the best way to confirm to cyber security conscious DH that their £620 was going to fraudsters. OP I think you're having a hard time from people who live in an idealistic world. And quite why the treasurer was SO angry about an overdue invoice isn't very forgiving or Christian.

There are more unpleasant backstabbing controlling people in the C of E, supposedly good Christian folk and pillars of their community, than I would ever have thought possible. Perhaps it's the same in other churches. They can be very unpleasant. I think possibly the Houses of Parliament contain nicer people than some on PCCs.

I'd try and forget about it, the silly old sod probably forgot to amend the invoice and resend and is now trying to make out you're the bad guys. Apologise to the vicar though and give him a bottle if you'd like to, you need him on side if you might want your future DC baptising there!

wasn't going to fraudsters

@AndAPartridgeInABearTree is totally right!

@Farontothemaddingcrowd

We have a long connection to the parish but I didn’t see that as relevant. The church warden’s son grew up with my DH and he grew up in the parish.

But it may well feel relevant to them, that's the point?

It's obvious their default means of sorting out finances is by cheque. You wanted to do something different, and then you got into extra complications because you were concerned about fraud. I get why you had those concerns - I would always be really careful too. But I can see how someone who wasn't so familiar with that mode of banking, might think you were doubting their personal honesty. They might be feeling quite hurt that someone who claimed to have a close personal connection to the parish, was now doubting their integrity.

I'm not saying you do doubt their integrity! But I really think it's likely that's why they feel so prickly.