I gave money away, what can I do?

Toe-Jam

andrew-the-cat wrote: »

Hmm that's interesting. It appears sort code determines the branch where the account is held (I didn't know this).

Not always, it depends on the bank.

Santander accounts all have 090127 (exclude a&l migrants)

But it will show you the branches of rbs natwest as they allocate a different number to each branch. I think Halifax do as well. I'm not sure about HSBC or LLoyds.

ChiefGrasscutter

Perhaps now we all can see why giving up cheques might be a bad idea.
Can you imagine the situation.
You want to pay the plumber, he gives you his banks details you put them in and do the transfer and of course the plumber says the transfer never arrived....yeah yeah you think.

Then you can spend months argueing about were the details right in the first place, did one of you mishear/misread them, were they entered up correctly. Who is lying about transferring the money or alternatively lying about not receiving it. Or maybe it was one of the two banks involved who have lost it though if it was a building society there is probably a third 'clearing' bank involved.

yup, I can see lots of fun to be had there in the future. Personally I'd just write a cheque to the plumber.

hermante

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

You want to pay the plumber, he gives you his banks details you put them in and do the transfer and of course the plumber says the transfer never arrived....yeah yeah you think.

Then you can spend months argueing about were the details right in the first place, did one of you mishear/misread them, were they entered up correctly. Who is lying about transferring the money or alternatively lying about not receiving it.

This would be avoided if the plumber gives you a proper invoice with his bank details, like lawyers and consultants do. Of course this means the plumber needs to have a printer in his van, depends whether he prefers to go to the bank to pay in cheques or to print invoices. But of course most plumbers prefer cash.

WelshRarebit

The trouble with electronic payments versus cheque payments is there is no validation done on the account holder name matching that of the corresponding account and sort code. As long as the sort code and account number are valid the payment will go through regardless of what you type in the account holder name field.

marvin

Personally when setting up a new payment from my account to my account I always test it with a small amount first and when that works use it normally.

andrew-the-cat

lynn2 wrote: »

Good luck Andrew, I hope you get your money back x

Thanks!

pqrdef wrote: »

Just one more flaw in our really badly designed payments system.

Well to be honest it is my fault, I've made loads of payments through my online banking before and this is the first one I've !!!!ed up. Thankfully it wasn't a huge amount. When you make payments with Santander you get a text message with a passcode you have to enter on the site before the payment will go through, and you do get several confirmation pages on the site and it also tells you the account number in the text message. It is my fault, I should have checked.

mustang1 wrote: »

What a nightmare! Can you get Santander to provide confirmation of the payment you have made and then take this to a Lloyds branch and show them the obvious error and ask them to extend your overdraft until this is resolved to avoid all the extra fees. It would show a bit of goodwill on their part and you could always threaten to leave (if you aren't reliant on the overdraft facility).

Good luck!

Well I don't have an overdraft on my Lloyds account yet, they wouldn't give me one when I opened the account. I haven't actually made any payments or done ANYTHING with it yet, the only money which has come out is the fee for it being a silver account (£1.90 a week or something like that).

Anyway a good end to the story, I've just checked my Santander online banking and who'd have though it, my money has arrived back into my account

alanq

Do bank accounts numbers not have check digits to catch single digit or switched digit errors? If not why not? Also I cannot understand why when making a payment one has to enter the name of the payee and then any mismatch between that and the name on the account owner is ignored. Also there should be a check digit on the sort code.

OK we should all be very careful but the system should be designed to be resilient against human error.

Mojisola

anselld wrote: »

Incidentally, I have been on the other end of this; received money from unknown source. Went in to bank to report it was not mine but they could not tell me where it came from (data protection!) and refused to do anything themselves to return it!!

I had this happen with a utility company. Someone else's DD was being paid into my account. I phoned the company several times to try to sort it out but they wouldn't do anything about it. Eventually all the money disappeared out of my account but they wouldn't discuss it with me at all. It was as if it had never happened!

andrew-the-cat

Cheers, don't know if you read two posts up but I've got my money back.

ChiefGrasscutter

hermante wrote: »

This would be avoided if the plumber gives you a proper invoice with his bank details, like lawyers and consultants do. Of course this means the plumber needs to have a printer in his van, depends whether he prefers to go to the bank to pay in cheques or to print invoices. But of course most plumbers prefer cash.

Some 10+ years ago I was receiving an electronic transfer from a financial institution.

They wouldn't accept my bank details as supplied by me, they needed a bank statement with my address etc on it to confirm that all was indeed correct. This I duly supplied.
Well we can all guess what happened next...
Who ever in the financial group actually entered the details into their system to do the transfer swapped round two digits in the account number - fortunately to a non existing account at my bank's branch (they got the sort code right).
So the money when into a suspense account while the financial group proudly sent me confirmation in the post of the transfer - with of course the incorrect details for all to see (whoops).

The speed at which they located the missing money, and rectified the error was indeed impressive as were the apologies!