Alliance & Leicester (merged)

zoony67

In my opinion A & L is one of the worst banks I have ever come into contact with. I do not have any dealings with them but my young daugter who is 19 opened a premier current account with them five months ago. She went overdrawn by 4.98 and ended up witha £230.00 of bank charges ! We received nothing from A & L to advise of this matter until eventually a letter did arrive which they claim is a second letter to a first letter which we did not receive.

Once we had this letter I wrote a letter to them for my daugter and we did not recieve a reply, so I sent a second letter and still they do not reply, I have a third letter ready to send and in the meantime my daugther has closed the account and is paying A & L £35.00 a month to clear the charges that they have applied.

Its wholly unreasonable and disproportionate in the level of charges A & L applied and how a company like A & L can ignore written items of correspodence and complaint is nothing short of disgusting !

I run a business and was considering transfering my business to A & L Business, however they have shown themselves to be most unbusiness like and I have now dismissed all notion of providing them with any of my money.
Lets hope enough people read the posts on this forum most of which are negative for A & L and I would strongly advise anyone seeking a new bank to avoid A & L like the plague, they are the parasites of the banking system make no mistake:

chrisleonard

I second the views above this is the worst bank ever.

I never abuse my banks and dont use and overdraft though in 2 years have clocked up £2k in bank charges and got bad credit through it.

They wait until you have no money then charge you for something then they charge you£5 a day for going overdrawn.

Is it worth me using MCOL yet or is it not worth until this test case is totally over??

FABMAC

the more we are to fill complain about them, more chance we will have.
I also been charged £65 for an O.D of £4.80. Yes I should have checked my online statement, but I didn't used this account for a while and forgot about a DD I set up last year. yes they send you a statement with the fee taken 14 days later, but by now I am 13 days O.D then. That's why they don't rush to notify you by email the O.D!! but send endless advertising email for a loan or insurance....

chrisleonard

Thats So True

suelongman

:mad: H I its been a while since i have visited this site,because of the court case and every thing being on hold.But i am having some real problems with Alliance and Leicester that i thought i would have i look on hear and seen if i could get some help.

i have been with the bank for 2 years and in that time have collected over 1,305.00 in charges. i have tried to get them back to no avail.the last lot was in january £100 for 2unpaid d/d and 2paid d/d ,this is because of a managment agustment of £82.00,this was because of the fraud debt taken money out of my account becase i dident sighn a letter that was sent to me in october.i had my card cloned in october,they refunded me the money to my account straight away.But they sent me a letter to sign wich i dident get so therefore i couldent sign it.then in january without any warning they took the money back from my account.at the same time they took £173 out of my account because of a computor blipp on the 31st december that dident pay a standing order .Idid notice the standing order was not payed and because it was my rent i made a money transfere to pay it.
When i called the said bank they informed me of all of this.So iwas cgarged £100 in charges for smething that i feel was not my faul and i complaind bitterly on the phone and i was very upset as this would have left me with no money.the lady at the other end of the phone said that what i called do was suspend my account apply to have my charges back under the hardship fund.So i did this and i spent4weeks going to the bank every friday and waiting up to an hour to get athoriseation from the credit debt to get my husbands wages, i then decided that i had had enough so i called the credit debt which is not a free number and waited 45 mins .to see if i could use my account againthey said that i could as long as i paid the £130 charges on my account so i did. But i still filled in all the forms to get my charges back thru the hardship route .i sent all the forms back a mmonth ago.called them 2 weeks later and they told me that there was a letter in the post.i called them again yesterday and they said that i would not get my charges back and that i did not have a case under financiale hardship.

Ihave no filled in more forms to the FOS TO MAKE A COMPLAINT

I HAVE FOUND THE ALLIANCE AND lEICESTER VERY UNHELPFULL ALL THE WAY:mad: :mad: :mad:

kapz

@evilgiraf: Same story as you. I have been overseas for a few months and came home to find 5 letters and an overdraft fee of 285 quid for going 4.86 into overdraft!!!

I have spoken to their customer service and they were totally unhelpful. Will speak to their credit controller tomorrow (after Easter) but I doubt they will help. I have a letter ready for them which I will send out if they don't retract the charges.

I will probably need to pay the charges tomorrow if they don't retract it and hopefully win a reclaim later on.

It's totally unfair - 5 quid over - 285 in charges for less than 3 months! I can't believe that's legal.

Also, yes they did send me letters (which I didn't see until I got back) which is fair enough - BUT I have just realised that the first letter came saying my account was overdrawn by 90-something. That was AFTER that had already charged me 85 in overdraft fees!!!!

I don't buy the 'you should have checked your online statement' either - I had no reason to for my disused account. The customer service guy gave me the same answer on the phone as MarkyMarkD - exactly the same.

evilgiraf

@kapz: Yeah - i think you'll need to pay off the debit to stop any more problems.
Best of luck! :beer:

MarkyMarkD

Eh?

You would have been told when it was £5, before it was debited. It only became £90 or £100 because you didn't check your account and credit the £5.

Why on earth do banks have to send LETTERS to people who have opened up an ONLINE account which only provides online statements?

Maybe you shouldn't open an online account if you can't be bothered logging on to check your statement once a month?

CBlaze

MarkyMarkD seems a bit suspect, I think he actually works for A&L, but is pretending to be an 'ordinary banking consumer'. A lot of companies do this, where they enlist someone from their PR dept to to put a spin on their policies, or to promote themselves.

The beauty of competition is that you can change bank accounts, to a competitor, which I have done. I'm with HSBC (who have always been good to me), and Halifax who offer £5 (not much I know) a month to pay in my salary.

natweststaffmember

CBlaze wrote: »

MarkyMarkD seems a bit suspect, I think he actually works for A&L, but is pretending to be an 'ordinary banking consumer'. A lot of companies do this, where they enlist someone from their PR dept to to put a spin on their policies, or to promote themselves.

The beauty of competition is that you can change bank accounts, to a competitor, which I have done. I'm with HSBC (who have always been good to me), and Halifax who offer £5 (not much I know) a month to pay in my salary.

I'm not sure it really matters whether MarkyMarkD works for A&L or any other financial institution if he tries to advise. Keep your friend close and your enemies closer