Bank Charges - illegal?

keitho1234

Your bank is either either very stupid to think they can pass on your "debt" or they are they are trying to bully you into stopping your action against them. Hope you can get some good advice from the yahoo group. What bank is it can i ask?

lynn44

Who you asking keith ?

keitho1234

Sorry should have said May

bmckay

Hi, can anybody here give me some advice

I sent HBOS a letter a week ago asking for £474 of illegal charges back or I would be seekin further legal advice. Unsurprisingly I havent heard back from them.

I was just about to write another letter demanding the full sum back within 2 weeks or I'll be going to court when I read May's post above.

Dont know what to do now, if they closed my account I would owe £700 (overdraft) but the charges would only cover £474 so I would have to pay a debt collecting company the remaining money.

What would people on here who have done this before do in my position?
Starting to think it's a bit more bother than it's worth.

dchurch24

How long ago was the first charge - you can claim 8% APR for each 'offence', so that may increase the amount they owe you.

The older the charge the more APR is accrued, so you may find you would owe them less than you thought.

May

Hi guys, it's the Halifax! Incidently, i have taken my custom elsewhere.

bmckay

dchurch24 wrote:

How long ago was the first charge - you can claim 8% APR for each 'offence', so that may increase the amount they owe you.

The older the charge the more APR is accrued, so you may find you would owe them less than you thought.

Cheers dchurch. The first charge was in August this year so I dont think it would increase it by much.

Ive wrote a letter out that im going to send to them to give them another chance to refund my money. I dont care if they close my account, I can always open another one and if they want the other £220 they can have it at £20 a month. The only reason my overdraft is at 700 is cos of their charges anyway.

here's the letter im sending them.

wrote:

I recently sent a letter requesting that you refund the unfair charges made to my account from August 2005.

Since I have not received a reply, I assume that you will not be refunding these penalty charges.

I write today to inform you that I feel you were exploiting me during a period of financial difficulties with these punitive charges. As I stated in my earlier letter, your charges do not reflect any actual or real loss, instead they appear to represent a lucrative profit-making scheme. Your charges, therefore, represent a penalty and are irrecoverable at common law.

As a gesture of goodwill, I will give you another chance to refund the total amount of these charges, £474, within the next 14 days, or I will commence court proceedings without any further notice.

Yours faithfully.

think the 'gesture of goodwill' bit is too cheeky?

May

bmckay - You may just be better off taking them to court. In my letters to the Halifax i explained the punitive charges to them and they came back with a reply that it as their overheads that cost this amount of money. It has been a constant argument via letter writing with them - each time they come back with a different excuse. It's getting tiring now so if they don't refund the charges, just fill in your claim online - it couldn't be simpler.

bmckay

I will take them to court but the reason I sent another letter is just to get Christmas out the way!
They didn't even respond to my last letter so Im not expecting a response to this one. And I read in another post that court should be the last resort so hoping that it will look better if Ive tried to correspond with them first.

Thanks for your help :xmassign:

gmc_3

Hi, great thread, great website too (https://www.bankchargeshell.co.uk).

Are there differences between Scottish and English bank customers (I know us scots have tighter purse strings) when it comes to making a claim?

Thanks