Icesave / TalkTalk / FSCS Fiasco

parcival

What an absolute shambles. To summarise:

The FSCS has used a bunch of amateurs to send out 200,000 emails when the situation calls for letters which is far more secure. I used to be a Postie and whatever people might think the Royal Mail are very reliable at delivering letters.

However the chosen method is email. Surely any half competent techie would envisage problems with spam filters and would have contacted TalkTalk and other ISP's in advance and said 'we are going to deliver xxxthousand emails tomorrow please allow them to pass through the system without hinderance'.

Even if they couldn't manage to do that surely TalkTalk should be allowing them to hit the recipients email accounts but filtering them to the spam folder for the recipient to decide if they want it or not. Who are TalkTalk to decide that an email should simply be deleted from the system. I must say that this might well prompt me to finally leave TalkTalk - looks like Tiscali are cheaper anyway. Has anyone on Tiscali had any problems with undelivered emails.

Oh - and no I still have not received the first email and I do not think changing my email in Icesave is a good idea as the FSCS will have taken off a file of valid email addresses weeks ago and changing it now will get you the first email but is bound to cause problems down the line.

nilrem_2

As I mentioned in another post -:

The simplest way around this is to sign up for an email address with googlemail or similar then log into your icesave account and change your address there, repeat the blank email process and you should get the emails.

Others here have done this with success.

going2die_rich

It seems the issue is with your ISP, not the fact that they decided to email instead of posting. Which was the right decision, as letters do get lost/delayed and take much longer than emails.

Obviously the issue of ending up in the spam folder is a problem, but so is letters not arriving or being delayed.

I think emails is the way forward though, but with anyone that hasn't contacted them within X amount of time should then be sent a letter as a backup.

By the way, emails are more secure than postal. Post goes through too many hands and as BBC programmes have highlighted, not every postie is trusthworthy. Hence the reason so many credit cards etc. go missing during transit.

DigitalJedi

Hmmm

The FSCS sent out the mails. Your ISP's mail filter blocked them. Something the FSCS has no control or even knowledge over. How can this be their fault?

To use a snail-mail analogy, the FSCS posted the letters to everyone yet your dog picked up the letter and placed it in the bin. Who's fault is that?

cos69

No thanks - sort out your email, its your responsibility not that of the FSCS. And what do I do when the letter does not arrive in the post, at least with email I can check where it might be

Contact the FSCS and ask they send all future information to you via paper mail, for me the current system looks fast and efficient.

KingL

There have been helpful hints posted on the other threads about how you can deal with this. The general drift is to identify the email address that the emails will come from (this has been posted on the other threads relating to the email; make arrangement with your ISP/spam filter such that that address is not blocked; then follow the FSCS instructions to inform them that you haven't received the email and they will send a second one which you should confirm receipt of.

btw, between 10 and 20% of my incoming and outgoing snail mail is never delivered. The Royal Mail isn't always as robust as you'd like to think!

soulsaver

Seems reasonable to me that an internet based account should use email to communicate with its customers. I think that shortcoming if any was that they should have advertised via sites like this & the FSA/FSCS site what email addy they'd use a) to prevent phishing & b) so people & ISPs could set their spam filters accordingly. So yep could have thought out a little better but I'm not complaining, just pleased to be getting ALL of my deposit & interest. Gordonblessya ..;)

Blah99

About 200,000 IceSave customers, that would be about £76,000 to send everyone a first class letter.

planemad

Not only that but ICESAVE "was" a INTERNET bank account, most dealings were done by email, transactions were done by email come to think of 99% of the account functions were done online.

Nothing has changed and I feel that this is the best way to do it, your concerns should be directed at your ISP.

EalingSaver

Obviously not the only one thinking this - but why on earth would one consider using physical post for a bank which had an internet only presence?

And as for phishing, providing they are not sending out links, and tell people that, and they have, then what is the problem?

Heh, better still, why don't they just abandon this ridiculous idea of doing the whole process on-line, and instead send out 200,000 forms for us to fill in. I'm sure that would be a lot more efficient all round......we can fill in the forms, send them back, someone at the other end can manually transcribe the informatoin from the forms into some system, that can then be married up with the accounts (presumably with an error rate of lets say 5% or so) and maybe some day we'll see our money.

Paul_Herring

EalingSaver wrote: »

And as for phishing, providing they are not sending out links, and tell people that, and they have, then what is the problem?

You might want to look at your first email again; there was a link in it. And it wasn't related to the sending email address. Certainly a reason for the more broken spam filters to mark it as spam.