Transfered all our money into wrong account

[swimmer55]

First time poster, just had a panicked call from my husband, he has transferred all of our savings in to a new account at a new bank (its been sitting in a current account for a couple of years gaining no interest so now interest rates are rising slightly we decided to transfer), by transposing 2 numbers it has gone to a strangers account, the bank are on it but have said it will take up to 24 days and there's a possibilitythey won't be able to return it, has this happened to anyone else and what was the outcome ? Its all of our savings so we are panicking!

You can click through and choose to ignore the warnings if the name is mismatched. You can't click through if the account details don't exist. The OP said the numbers were incorrect and didn't match any account so they hoped it was in holding. None of the banks signed up to the Confirmation of Payee system will let you put a transfer through if the numbers don't match an existing account. If the account doesn't exist then you can't transfer money to it.

This scheme was introduced in the last two years. So yy in the past you might have been able to send money into limbo if you used details that didn't exist but most banks don't let you do that any more. And if anyone has a bank that does let you send money into the ether then you should switch to one of the others.

I used to work for a bank and worked the in
’internal accounts department’ for a while. This very thing happens a lot more than you could imagine- hundreds of thousands of pounds each and every day.

The money is in an account belonging to the bank - all the money transferred to accounts that don’t exist bounce into the catch all internal account for that sort code.

People who work in the bank go through these accounts every day and try to clear them back to zero. Each type of transaction has its own protocols to return or move on the funds. As it’s from one bank to another they might have to return it which can take a few days, or what might happen is they will move it into your OH’s new account if they have been given the new account details. It’s much easier to move the money into the correct account with the same bank that it is to send it back.

Difficult to do as transferring money has double checks these days. You are most likely to get all your money back.
It would be illegal if an undeserving recipient tried to transfer the money to hide it without knowing where it came from. If it is a genuine mistake the bank will just get it returned straight away without the recipient being involved. I used to work for a bank and this happens a great deal. Twice I have had large sums appearing into my account; I never touched the money and it soon disappeared back to where it came from.

The bank can only request it back, receiver doesn’t have to give it back(you can take them to court if they don’t).

However, I’d have serious questions:

1. how did it happen? Banks have so many checks in place before a transfer, so it would have warned him accounts don’t match.
2. have you seen the Account number it was transferred to?
3. have you spoken to bank about the timescales directly?

I just want to add that this happened to us. My husband's aunt died and left us £83 000 and my husband transferred it to our mortgage provider. Luckily I checked with the mortgage provider a week later and found out they hadn't received it so we went back to the bank and it turned out the counter person had put the wrong number on the slip and my husband had signed it without checking... luckily the incorrect bank account number didn't belong to anyone so essentially the money was floating about in the ether for a few days. Rest assured my husband is not trusted to do anything like this now! It's left to me because I am the triple checker. We even got £100 in compo from the building society. But it was a frightening time for me. Imagine losing that much.money.

My friend did it with £600 and the person refused to give it back so she lost it

Some people are very dishonest. It was a serious amount of money to her at the time and left her extremely broke.

I always wonder if karma caught up with the horrid individual who kept her money

As someone who works in a bank, involved in fraudulent and missing payments and CRM there is SO much incorrect and outdated advice on this thread. People are also maintaining 'this is how it works' when they're actually talking about bank specific processes - for example just because one bank physically stops you sending a payment if there's a name mismatch does NOT mean that's a catch-all industry policy and all will.

I'm not going to add another voice saying 'this is correct, look at my advice!' 😂 but for anyone in a similar situation to the op, please ignore most of the well meaning but flat out wrong advice on this thread! You'll get far more accurate info just googling. I believe the Financial Ombudsman website also has a helpful consumer article about payment issues.

Years ago, I was on benefits as a single parent. I had £33k transferred into my account one day. All I can say is I was very surprised to see it there! I didn't use online banking at the time so didn't even notice it was there for at least a week and had no notification from the bank, that poor person must have been frantic thinking I'd nicked it. Anyway, I called the bank secretly hoping I'd won the lottery and not been told 😆 They looked into it which seemed to take ages and the money was returned about two months later!!

It was actually quite a faff for me as I had to get proof for the DWP that I wasn't hiding money from them and was almost taken off benefits at one point 😢

In fairness @ChanceNorman i specified the name of my bank and asked the OP which bank they were with, for that very reason, because the main banks do have all the checks and balances in place but not all. People have also suggested to the OP that they would do well to switch to one of the main banks that give all those safeguards.

i can say 100% that 2weeks ago, I couldn't pay for a service because the person hadn't given me the exact name of their company as it appeared on their account, so it didn't match their account no and sort code and I had to ring them up and verify it, to be able to pay them online. It does work well.

The problem with changing to one of the big name banks is their interest rates are rubbish. Apart from the ones for small amount of savings (like £50 a month for a year or something) my bank was paying 0.1% interest. I switched to a less well known bank, recommended by MSE, and I'm getting 1.25%. That is for instant access (money I don't want to tie up as possibly moving house) I could get a higher interest rate if I tied my money up for a year or two.

So my new saving account is with a bank that doesn't provide the facility to check the name and account number so when I sent the money over my high st bank couldn't confirm the account. I sent £10, then £100 to make sure and then transferred all our savings. With inflation the way it is 1.25% isn't keep up with inflation but 0.1% is a joke.

Just checked MSE and they now have a bank offering 1.5% for instant access. None of the rates they are showing are with one of the big high st banks.

if anyone else is worried about making this
mistake, the thing to do is transfer a nominal amount, check it works ok then transfer the bulk of cash

my boss taught me this and ill always do it

What sort of person would refuse to return someone else’s money?! Disgusting.