HSBC Bank account closed for undisclosed reasons & large sum seized

gt94sss2

noah271007 wrote: »

Imagine this scenerio. I am profoundly deaf and don't speak on phone but do text and email. Went out shopping and found my card has been declined. It would be impossible for the bank to speak to me verbally to confirm i have attempted a transaction and to confirm personal details as i have a hearing impairment. What would be the solution?

My thoughts to minimise this happening to anyone would be to:

- tell your bank you will be travelling overseas
- as I suggested earlier in this thread, keep a spare debit/credit card (from another institution) just in case!

Regards
Sunil

facingthefuture

They will also notify the tax man!

VanCrack

I reckon the deaf bloke would get a text, assuming he can read. Or perhaps he's blind too.

Paul_Herring

noah271007 wrote: »

Imagine this scenerio. I am profoundly deaf and don't speak on phone but do text and email. Went out shopping and found my card has been declined. It would be impossible for the bank to speak to me verbally to confirm i have attempted a transaction and to confirm personal details as i have a hearing impairment. What would be the solution?

Text phone? 1800 108457 125 563

missile

noah271007 wrote: »

So far, i never had any problems, but i know one day it will probably happen particularly while aboard. What would be the solution?

I have no hearing inpediment. However, I travel quite a lot and dread the card declined scenarion. My solution is to ensure that I always have at least two debit cards and credit cards from different banks.:j

missile

:rolleyes:It would be nice if OP gave us an update:rolleyes:

Snooze

dianauni wrote: »

On two occasions recently my debit card has not worked and I was not able to buy food for the weekend nor petrol, had to leave all my shopping in supermarket! Apart from being very inconvenient as I do like to eat it was embarrassing with a queue of people behind me waiting whilst the cashier tried my card in the machine a couple of times, to no avail.

And the reason for this, I had on the first occasion used my card on a gaming site for the first time and the bank thought it might be a fraudulent transaction. Could they not have phoned to ask me I queried. That, it seems, was too much to expect.

On the second occasion they stopped my card because I had used it twice on the internet, once for 50p placing an ad in a well known local paper and secondly for £1.00 postal charges on another site. Their reasoning? I had never used either site before. I told the girl that with it coming up to Christmas it was quite likely I would be shopping via sites I had never used before and were they going to stop my card after every transaction?

I have written to the bank about this and await their reply - not HSBC - let's just say that I doubt very much that Fred the Shred ever had HIS card stopped!!!

No. The reason they stopped it is because crims often test whether a card is live by doing a small 'test' purchase first, usually a quid or so.

R

Snooze

musehead wrote: »

I had a surprise on Friday when my debit card was not working so logged onto my internet banking to find my current account had disappeared! After enquiring by phone it turns out my account has been closed with no reason given. According to them a letter was sent so I went and opened a load of statement-looking letters which had accumilated as i've been out of the country for most of last month. My mistake of course for not opening them sooner, but this is the last thing I would expect - my credit history is perfect, i've had this account for 5 years and never had any problems.



A phone number is given for queries and the letter is simply signed "Manager".

After several phone calls to the given phone number and normal customer service it appears my local branch manager is responsible for the order to close my account, but he seems very hard to contact. I went into the branch on Friday and was promised a return call on Monday (they refused to talk to me at the time because the queue for the cashier was too long). I also rang this morning to try and get put through to the branch but all they could do was say the manager would ring me back. It's past business hours now and no phone call has been received.

They also said that the manager might choose not to tell me why my account was closed, apparantly they have no obligation to do so.

The most annoying part of this is that I had perhaps the highest balance i've ever had in my current account at the time it was closed as I was planning to put it into a NS&I bond. A transaction dated 6th November and labelled "BALANCE TO CLOSE" debited just over £99,000 from my account. It was 3 days ago that HSBC seized the best part of £100k from me and I still have no explaination as to where the money has gone and when I might get it back, other than a notice (without timescale) that they will send me a cheque. Had the bond been opened as planned i'd be earning 3.95% on that money now.

But what if i'd been approaching the deadline for a house deposit, or a debt repayment? Surely HSBC can find the time to phone a customer back who had £100k frozen in the system without explaination. Does this not count as an important issue to them? This is bad customer service to the extreme.

Regarding reasons for it being closed, all I can speculate is that I have used it a lot for gambling transactions and also use it a lot as a base account to move money between different savings accounts. All my regular bills and cash withdrawals are also from this account. Never been overdrawn, no T&Cs broken or anything. Only bank charge was one I had about 5 years ago from a returned direct debit.

I will visit the branch again tomorrow :rolleyes:

Money Laundering, without a doubt. Where did this 100k come from? If it hasn't come from a legitimate traceable source, eg. cash deposits or cheques/transfers from other personal accounts, then this is what happens. Also, as someone else mentioned, using online gambling sites always raises flags as crims use these to deposit funds from nicked card details, rinse them by doing some artificial playing, and then collect the cash out of the other end, although this is MUCH harder to do these days as the gambling sites now only let your withdraw back to the same source as the deposit.

R