Bank Charges taken from benefits?

flo5

Hi

Not sure if this is the right board - so apologies if I have got it wrong.

My daughter has a basic card account with Nationwide who have charged her £90.00 for unpaid direct debits. 1@ £13, 1@ £7 and 1 at £4. I should mention that all of these were for payment for Insurance that Nationwide had set up following an interview with my daughter re her needs!

I accept that if she does not have the money she should not have Direct Debits that cannot be meet ( we have had a long chat about this). The problem is they have taken the charges out of her account from her Child Tax Credit leaving her with nothing.:mad: I went into the branch and discussed this with a very helpful lady who talked her manager into repaying these charges in the circumstances. She then phoned the refund of charges dept and hit a brick wall , we do not know exactly what was said but it was unhelpful was all the advisor would tell us. The policy is it will take up to 5 working days. (Sorry this has been so long winded ! ) Can banks take a person's benefit money to pay themselves (charges)?

If anyone can give me some guidance or point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

many thanks

willo65

Yes they can, there is hundreds of threads on this and if you use the search function you could probably spend the best part of a day reading them all.

Extant

The law aside, the FOS takes an extremely dim view of banks taking benefits and leaving the customer with no money...

flo5

Thank you BarclaysManager, your comments were most helpful:T

Thank you Willo65 for pointing me in right direction

Thanks