Report Bank Charges successes and failures

hypnogirl89

jamie1983 wrote: »

Has anyone had any luck with Natwest claiming there charges back?

I had an account with them from 2000 to 2007, i closed the account and moved to another bank as it was a staff account and they forgot to keep removing the tag from it, i during that time had a few bank charges some of which reached upto £200, i asked back at October 2010 for a good will gesture of the charges to be refunded, no interest just the charges but was sdeclined on the grounds that they claimed they were invesitigating and such, i have recently sent another letter outlining the financial impact which they have had on my life etc and i am waiting to here. However I am wondering whether anyone has had any luck with Natwest Charges??

Yes, I have today had a breakthrough!
I went overdrawn last year by under £4 and the charges kept coming and coming, building up to over £300. I used the template letter, I DIDNT ask for goodwill for financial hardship. My complaint was based on the fact that UNFAIR charges had snowballed and now were impossible to get out of. Also the fact that hundreds of pounds of charges had amounted to going ONLY £3.54 overdrawn.
I sent the letter on Monday 11/7/11 by recorded next day delivery to the Westminster Bank in London. I had a call from them less than an hour ago saying that they are writing off all current and pending charges and putting my account in credit of £140 (the amount that I originally paid in to cover the charges).
They don't care about your life! But they do care about going to court. If you take this to the Ombudsman or courts, they will lose. You have to threaten them to get anything.
Use the template letter, don't bring your personal life into it. You need to tell them what they have done wrong as a bank, and don't make it emotional or use "threatening language". I will post my letter below..

hypnogirl89

National Westminster Bank PLC
135 Bishopsgate
London
EC2M 3UR

Dear Sir or Madam,

Account number: ******

On the 10th October 2010 my account went overdrawn by £3.57 and a charge of £20 was added to my account. To rectify this, a member of my family credited my account with £25 so I was no longer overdrawn. To my knowledge, this put my account in credit and the problem was dealt with.
However, due to the £20 charge to my account, another charge of £20 was added. I was not made aware of this by Natwest. This was an account I didn’t use often and was intending to close it at my soonest convenience. To my knowledge my account was in credit and there was no need to check it. I was unaware that my account had gone overdrawn due to the added charges, which in itself were causing more charges to be added.

When I found out about these charges in February, I called Natwest and spoke to a woman in the call centre. She said that I was accumulating charges due to the fact that the £25 debited to my account didn’t cover the £20 charge on the £23.57 overdrawn. At this point I was £38.57 overdrawn. I agreed to pay this amount off in the next couple months and she said she would freeze my account to stop any further charges being applied. I still didn’t understand why I had to pay almost £40 for going overdrawn by under £4.

On 11th March 2011, I paid £38.57 into my account, with the intention of paying all charges then closing the account. When trying to close my account, I was informed that there were further charges to be paid. Months’ worth of £6 a day charges had been added to my account without my knowledge, adding up to several hundred pounds worth of charges.
In order to pay off the charges, I set up a payment plan with Natwest and have paid £75 into the account.

Having investigated the issue further, I believe that this situation is covered by the FSA’s regulatory principle to ‘pay due regard to the interests of its customers and treat them fairly’. I am also claiming a refund of the fees for the following reasons:

I believe the fact that I have been incurring bank charges goes contrary to the aims of the Lending Code (Section 9) and Banking Conduct of Business Sourcebook (section 5.1.4 ‘in particular, a firm should deal fairly with a banking customer whom it has reason to believe is in financial difficulty’), and previously were contrary to the Banking Code.

For an initial unauthorised amount of £3.57 I now owe £298. I believe that this is not a fair treatment.

I ask you to clear all charges to the account and repay the funds which I have paid due to the direct result of the unfair charges applied, a total of £118.57. I have attached a full schedule of the charges with this document.

I look forward to a full response to this letter within 14 days and if I do not receive a satisfactory response I intend to pursue my complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service or small claims court at the earliest opportunity.

Yours faithfully,


**Within 4 days of sending the letter..they have cleared all current and pending charges, and refunded me £140. They are also sending me a letter of explanation and apology. Very happy :-) **

m4rkd4vies

Hi

I'm new to the site and I am after some advice. I recently followed the instructions on this site to claim back bank charges from my Lloyds TSB and HSBC bank accounts for charges applied over the past 6 years.
Charges for my Lloyds TSB account came to a total of £4337 and today I received a response after my first letter stating they would repay £480 of the charges and all pending charges would be waived to help with my financial hardship.
My account with them is currently in collections and I owe them a lot more than they are offering to refund. They also state in the letter that I can speak to their collections department to come to some arrangement but as far as the charges go, they state that I should take this as their 'Final' reply. They have included an income and expenditure form for me to send back and have advised me to contact FOS if I am not happy with this response. (Which makes me feel like they are confident they would win).

I know I probably seem greedy but I feel I could/should get more back than what they are offering and I am only looking to claim this money back to clear my debt with them!

Does anyone have any thoughts?
Has anyone tried negotiating with the Lloyds TSB before?
Is it possible?

Thanks for your help, and a massive thank you to Martin and everyone at Money Saving Expert for providing all the info and templates on this site.:beer: Cheers!!

Mark

Lovemoney

BANK: Barclaycard
AMOUNT CLAIMED: £420
INTEREST SINCE 8/6/05: £176.54
TOTAL AMOUNT OFFERED: £420+£176.54= £596.54

FOS acting on my behalf wrote to baclaycard on 21/6/11 and got 2nd reply by 9/7/11 said Barclaycard are prepared to credit your chosen bank account with £420 and £176.54 statutory interest. A six year schedule of charges is enclosed. But according MSE website court interest calculations should be £205.09.
I need advice here should I accept the offer or write to them ask for more?
PLEASE PLEASE HELP!!!

tilly2484

Hi Guys, I applied for getting back bank charges in 2009- but they were put on hold. Can i now chase it up- do another claim?

Thanks

fudgerella08

Bank name: Natwest
Amount Reclaimed: £456.00
Amount they paid: £372.00
The story:
Put in a hardship claim with natwest for £456 at the begining of June. I was sent a financial information form from Natwest to fill in and send back, this detailed my income and out goings, and anything i owed money too.

I recieved a letter back from natwest on Monday 18th July, saying that they had reviewed my details, and that i did not meet the critira for financial hardship (even tho i owe on my utilities ect), so they would not be refunding my anything, and that all there charges are fair!

EXCEPT!!!!!! On Friday the 15th July (4 days before i got the rejection letter) i had email the CEO of Natwest, complaining that i had heard nothing back about my financial hardship claim. I get an email back the same day saying that its been passed to the relevent department and they would look into it.

So, Monday morning i get the rejection letter in the post, about an hour later i get an email saying they had looked at my claim and will refund me £372 of daily charges for being charged, charges on top or charges!

i could not believe it! - just checked my bank account this afternoon, and the £372 was setting there!

just goes to show!

AEB1972

GlynD wrote: »

Sent a letter to Bank of Scotland on 5/5/11 using a well modified template from this site. Yesterday I received a call from a foreign sounding gentleman representing the bank. Now normally I do not speak to anyone who sounds foreign unless they confirm to me that they're not calling from an "out of country" call centre (UK Jobs For UK People is my philosophy) but on this occasion, smelling money, I held back my natural instincts to complaint about a cheap foreign labour force who can barely speak the Queen's English. (I promise it's not xenophobia). Turns out that the bank want to immediately refund £250 of the £575 I claimed. They're doing that as we speak.

NOTE: Be careful, this gentleman wanted me to say that this was a full and final settlement so he would have it on tape. I emphasised that I was only accepting this as an interim payment and would pursue the rest of my claim plus whatever else would be discovered once the bank had provided missing statements.

In general though I found him very helpful and I would urge any other Bank of Scotland customers to use the template letters.

Word of Warning: they're claiming that "Fairness" is no longer a criteria since the Supreme Court decision. Claiming that alone could lead to a bit of a fight.

I hope this information helps someone else as much as this site has helped me. Now: onwards with a credit card claim.

I too handed in a letter to the Bank of Scotland (my local branch) dated 15/07/2011 using the template letter from this site, revised to personalise and using the humane avenue. I didn't leave until I had a receipt in hand. This was for £3500 worth of charges since 2007. Again like many on this forum the majority of this was caused by the 'snowballing' of charges & their refusal to change the date of payment of charges. I was woken up this morning by a phone call from a Bank of Scotland employee asking if it would be ok to discuss my claim. She said she had my letter in front of her and that she was very sorry for all the problems I have experienced over the years. She referred to the court case and its ruling, but said that they would like to help ease my situation now by paying back all the unauthorised charges accumilated this year (£450) to wipe clean the charges due to be paid next month and to suspend all charges for a 12 month period from todays date. I told her that although that sounded extremely tempting I would like to be able to pursue this further through the FOS using the humane/hardship avenue as it is a lot of money. She said she would send out their final response letter to me asap and that she would still be willing to do as she has offered. I have no idea if this will be carried out now or only if I receive and accept their final offer!!!??? It was too early for my brain to function as I was just off a nightshift... Thankfully after reading your message above I DID state in the phone call that I wanted to follow the FOS route. Phew!! Plus after reading through pages and pages on this site I now have another tip to use, how can they say £35 is fair and then reduce it to £5 as my bank has recently done... Is that now saying the original cost didn't reflect their true costs?

haydens_mum

AEB1972 wrote: »

I too handed in a letter to the Bank of Scotland (my local branch) dated 15/07/2011 using the template letter from this site, revised to personalise and using the humane avenue. I didn't leave until I had a receipt in hand. This was for £3500 worth of charges since 2007. Again like many on this forum the majority of this was caused by the 'snowballing' of charges & their refusal to change the date of payment of charges. I was woken up this morning by a phone call from a Bank of Scotland employee asking if it would be ok to discuss my claim. She said she had my letter in front of her and that she was very sorry for all the problems I have experienced over the years. She referred to the court case and its ruling, but said that they would like to help ease my situation now by paying back all the unauthorised charges accumilated this year (£450) to wipe clean the charges due to be paid next month and to suspend all charges for a 12 month period from todays date. I told her that although that sounded extremely tempting I would like to be able to pursue this further through the FOS using the humane/hardship avenue as it is a lot of money. She said she would send out their final response letter to me asap and that she would still be willing to do as she has offered. I have no idea if this will be carried out now or only if I receive and accept their final offer!!!??? It was too early for my brain to function as I was just off a nightshift... Thankfully after reading your message above I DID state in the phone call that I wanted to follow the FOS route. Phew!! Plus after reading through pages and pages on this site I now have another tip to use, how can they say £35 is fair and then reduce it to £5 as my bank has recently done... Is that now saying the original cost didn't reflect their true costs?

Just to say i too have a claim at the FOS based on charges i had from barclays on my account amounting to over 2k between 2003-2007. i used the argument that if they were fair before why have thay reduced them from £35 to £8 and asked for the difference to be refunded as had i been charged just £8 before it would not have got as bad as it did.

Still waiting on FOS.

Rae115

Bank - Halifax
Claimed - £1700.00
Received so far - £906 +pence

Original letter sent on the 13th July requesting full refund of all charges since account opened in 2002. checked account yesterday the cleared the overdraft of the £906 + pence.

Rae

Rae115

Card Co - BHS
Claimed - 0.00
Received so far - £580

Original letter also sent on the 13th july requesting full refund of all charges. (didn't think i would get any back and didnt ask for an amount - i just asked for all charges) received a letter today listing all charges saying the £580 would be taken of my balance.

so AGAIN - THANKS MARTIN