Positive balances - getting your money back?

chriss3r

Ok,

So I'm about to 'accidently' balance transfer about £10k from my Barclaycard onto most likely an MBNA card.

If I call them up when the balance goes £10k positive, can I just ask them to send me a cheque or put it in my current account?

Anyone got any experience of this?.. I don't want to end up with a card with a £10k positive balance which I can't get my hands on.. I guess I could always ask them to close the account if that happened?

gingeralan

I gather this is not permitted. They know where the money comes from, I think best offer you'll get is for the receiving card company to transfer the money back where it came from. There was a thread about this exact thing happening not so long ago.

guesswho2000

You can ask them, they can either transfer it by cheque, bank transfer or back to where it came from. You're entirely at the discretion of MBNA as to whether they'll send you the money.

I did the same thing once (not to an MBNA but it was from a Barclaycard, not for £10k though!) and they BACS transferred to my current account, however others have reported difficulty getting the money back. MBNA do offer SBTs though, so you may be ok.

EDIT: If you close the account the same issue could remain, if they won't send it to you then they'll offer to transfer it back to where it came from, not saying they will, but it's a possibility.

InsideInsurance

Most often these days they will want to send it back from whence it came due to money laundering risks of allowing it to be sent somewhere else

msallen

Not in the same league, but I recently BT'd £2000 to a Mint card to clear it's balance (I'd already "closed" the card some time before to avoid a rate hike and was just paying it off). I then realised that I'd transferred about £40 too much. There will be a small final interest charge on my final statement, but it will be less than £40, so I will effectively end up with a closed account showing a small positive balance. I was hoping that I'd be able to get them to either send me a cheque of transfer to my current account, but having read this thread I'm not so sure now. As this is obviously not money laundering (or could be money laundering on an incredibly small scale I suppose!), do you think they'll comply?

aliasojo

msallen wrote: »

Not in the same league, but I recently BT'd £2000 to a Mint card to clear it's balance (I'd already "closed" the card some time before to avoid a rate hike and was just paying it off). I then realised that I'd transferred about £40 too much. There will be a small final interest charge on my final statement, but it will be less than £40, so I will effectively end up with a closed account showing a small positive balance. I was hoping that I'd be able to get them to either send me a cheque of transfer to my current account, but having read this thread I'm not so sure now. As this is obviously not money laundering (or could be money laundering on an incredibly small scale I suppose!), do you think they'll comply?

They will return the excess to you before closing the account finally. Just phone them up and explain what happened.

As for the OP, the transfer will likely get returned to the issuing source as stated above. This happened with me last year for £5k.