Santander - Direct Debit Reversed When Money Was Available

Binkey_2

Hello everyone, I was hoping you could help?

I have a joint Santander bank account with my partner. We set up our first ever Direct Debit in December to pay our Virgin Media bill and do not have any other DD's on the account. The payment to Virgin Media was due to be debited last Thursday, but to our horror we've found out that Santander returned it as unpaid.

I'm going to attempt to break it down so hopefully someone can shed some light onto what happened here - bare with me

1. 19/01/11

* £213 Cleared IB Benefit payment into Santander. £61.17 Virgin DD due out on 20/01/11 [the next day]. Money would have been in the account for a full 24 hours before the money was due to be taken.

2. 20/01/11

* £45 cleared IS Benefit payment paid into account.
* Santander return Virgin Media Direct Debit as unpaid.

Note: We have an ongoing separate issue regarding a WONGA debt - they have been taking money on a Continuous Authorised Transaction basis without our consent every time we have been getting our benefit through. We had previously told Santander that we revoke any/all payments to them, which additionally appears to have been ignored. :mad:

3. 21/01/11

* Santander make CAT payment of £41.96 to WONGA.
* We pay other bills @ PayPoint, do food shopping etc thinking that the amount that was missing was the Virgin Media DD when we checked the cash point in town.

4. 23/01/11

* Check balance online - find this mess of a situation.
* Find out that Santander chose to pay out a **second** CAT payment for £17.00 to WONGA after the above today.

That's where we are up to now Obviously we have now been charged for the returned DD by Santander [which we can't afford to repay], the money that we thought was going to Virgin is gone and we have no way of amending the situation currently and currently have NO money until we get paid the week after next.

The Virgin Media DD *IS* still showing as active in the Santander account online, we haven't canceled it, so I have no idea why they
refused to pay it when we had the money in there. :huh:

So, my question is, why did Santander ignore the DD when at the time we had enough cleared funds to pay the DD and STILL cover the money WONGA decided to put in for? :huh: :huh: :huh:

Also do we realistically have any chance of getting them to refund the charge as they appear to be the ones at fault?

Any thoughts would be great - please be gentle with me! :embarasse

~ B xx

izools

It sounds like the ledger balance showed sufficient funds for the direct debit to be taken, but there were pending VISA card authorisations to WONGA and / or other companies.

If the available balance (ledger balance less any pending authorisations) was below #61.17 the DD would have been returned unpaid.

Report your debit card as STOLEN with the bank and if WONGA charge you again despite having withdrawn permission to charge your account report the transactions as FRAUDULENT (theft) to the bank.

Good luck :beer:

pqrdef

Direct Debits aren't instantaneous, they're batch operations that take more than one working night to process. Virgin Media will have presented the debit for authorisation on the evening of the 18th, and Santander will have refused authorisation in the wee small hours of the 19th, before the incoming funds were cleared.

pqrdef

izools wrote: »

Report your debit card as STOLEN with the bank and if WONGA charge you again despite having withdrawn permission to charge your account report the transactions as FRAUDULENT (theft) to the bank.

Won't help. The bank will still make the payments, as they're guaranteed, and it will be very reluctant to stand the loss itself, reasonably enough.

You would have to show that you don't owe the money to Wonga, or that they don't have the contractual right to take it.

If you try to avoid payment by lying to the bank, you will be committing fraud against the bank and all hell will be let loose. Quite likely your money will be frozen, your account will be closed, and you won't be able to open one anywhere else.


The answer is to use more than one bank. Don't have your money paid into a bank that you owe money to, or into an account that creditors take money from.

starchild1972

You have to tell WONGA to stop the continous authority only they can stop it, Santander cannot authorise stopping the payment. If you report the card as lost/stolen ALL payments will be transferred to new card automatically.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/256