Advice required on lost BACS transfer from one bank to another

bittennails

Dear All

If anyone else has been in this situation, I'd welcome your advice.

A couple of weeks ago I made a payment from my current account to a credit card. This was done online using Internet Banking.

Sadly, although the 16 digit card number was right, the sort code wasn't and - from what I can gather - the money went to a "holding account" at the credit card company.

After lots of frustrating calls to both banks, each one says its up to the other one to trace and put right. Queue lots of calls to call centres in India, one bank slagging off the other, etc :-(

Has anyone else had any experience of this, and was it ever resolved properly?

Apparently this sort of mistake happens from time to time, and there are procedures in place to sort things out, but so far I seem to be hitting my head against a brick wall!

Thanks in advance :-)

Jay-Jay_4

Hi,

Unfortunately if you make a mistake while doing and on-line transfer then 'sorry' but it IS your own fault.

If you went into the bank to do a transfer and they did it wrong you'd be on here complaining at them.

BACS payments go from your account to a central processing unit, then to the receiving bank based on their sort code, if you input an incorrect sort code then it could be sent anywhere depending if the sortcode was valid for another bank or not.

If you enter incorrect details (like card number) the money goes to the correct location but would be sat in a suspense account. It will be somebodys job to match up the payments to the correct account, if they can find the correct account they will credit it, if not they will return it to your bank.

A bacs payment generally takes two days to hit the recieving account but if it is sent with the wrong details it will probably be sat in the suspense account for a few days, then if they need to return it it takes a couple more days. If it has been sent to the wrong sort code then it could take a lot longer depending if the wrong sort code was valid for another bank, or if it is invalid and has been rejected.

It happens a lot and the only thing that you can do is ensure that you enter the correct details next time.

ukric

The sending bank should trace the bacs payment. I know the one I work for does, the online helpdesk does it.

Walletwatch

ukric wrote:

The sending bank should trace the bacs payment. I know the one I work for does, the online helpdesk does it.

Agreed - no point really calling your intended recipient, as there is no way either the processing guys at BACS, nor at the remitting bank can divine what the actual sort code you wanted to use was, so there's hardly a chance that the payment will make its way through to your credit card account.

If the credit card guys are applying some late payment fees or something, you may try and convince them that this was because of a mistake when entering payment details, and hope that the guy you speak to is in a good mood to waive any such charges.

Your sender bank will probably have some kind of a transaction id on the particular debit to your acct, they should be able to track it down based on that reference.

Fatboy_NSS

Funny how this post is on here, and one a bit further up the board is about someone receiving unsolicited funds into their account. Maybe the two are related!