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Help please!!! transferred £300 into the wrong account.
Comments
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It's not the best idea, but it could certainly be done. Obviously you don't look for an exact match. You don't need to - you're not trying to identify the account positively by the name, you're only trying to trap account number errors.JuicyJesus wrote: »What the OP wants is a name check, which is completely impractical.
But fuzzy name matching is widely used in other contexts. Directory Enquiries has used it since the year dot. Several different principles can be used and you can make it a tight or as loose as you like.
Spell-checkers use fuzzy matching, and specifically to recognise words that are spelt differently from any known word. Name-matchers are smarter than that. They sort out titles and initials and they know about equivalences. A good system can match Featherstonehaugh with Fanshaw. If I ask Google for Edward Bundy it finds me Ted Bundy, although his name was actually Theodore.
Obviously systems like that use a knowledge base, not just a pattern matcher. This isn't the 60s and computers don't have to be naive now. Name matching would have been impractical once, but that doesn't mean it can never be revisited.
Google uses a fairly tight match. A looser match would be needed for account names and it would still catch the large majority of errors.
Systems can be bought in off-the-peg or customised to match the application. None of this is as sophisticated as something like the third-party PC fingerprinting system that Tesco Bank bought in to figure out whether you're on your regular PC."It will take, five, 10, 15 years to get back to where we need to be. But it's no longer the individual banks that are in the wrong, it's the banking industry as a whole." - Steven Cooper, head of personal and business banking at Barclays, talking to Martin Lewis0 -
Yes. That's why most debit and credit card numbers are checksummed now. The need is acknowledged.
That's why National Girobank used to use 9-digit account numbers, starting with a check digit. For BACS purposes the check digit was incorporated into the sort code. That was decades ago. But nobody else followed the lead they tried to give.
Anybody who sets up Direct Debits will tell you how many people can't give their own account details correctly. And sometimes the payment then gets taken from the wrong person's account (in spite of "Account name exactly as it appears on debit card").
This is why BACS now supports the account number validation service, as on sites like Postcode Anywhere.
But Santander (following Abbey, though ironically it's also the heir of Girobank) prefers to waste its sort code space rather than exploiting the available redundancy. So if you go on Postcode Anywhere and type in a Cahoot account, it'll say it can't validate it. And if you try to switch that account to Nationwide, the Nationwide website won't accept the instruction. It's not just complacent, it's broken.
So basically he's right. You're saying every time you get something wrong it's someone else fault really?0 -
A name check system would be helpful, but the banks may think that it's to expensive to install.
On a risk basis they may think it's acceptable to have a few payments going to incorrect accounts.Early retired - 18th December 2014
If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough0 -
Systems can be bought in off-the-peg or customised to match the application. None of this is as sophisticated as something like the third-party PC fingerprinting system that Tesco Bank bought in to figure out whether you're on your regular PC.
Oh yes, and that works really well considering I have to verify the computer I'm using EVERY time I log in. So if I don't happen to have my phone nearby I'm stuffed! :rollseyes:“You can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time.”0 -
Actually the first thing that's needed is for HMRC and the DWP to refuse to send tax credits and benefits to account numbers that they can't check out with the Vocalink validation service. That's what it's there for isn't it?JuicyJesus wrote: »they should change everyone's sort code and account number in order to protect a tiny minority of stupid people from the consequences of not being able to input, check and confirm an eight digit account number correctly when carrying out basic financial transactions involving real money.
Then the offending banks would have to get their !!!!!! into gear PDQ.
It could happen sooner than you think. The DWP must make way more misdirected payments than anybody else, to claimants who misquote their own details."It will take, five, 10, 15 years to get back to where we need to be. But it's no longer the individual banks that are in the wrong, it's the banking industry as a whole." - Steven Cooper, head of personal and business banking at Barclays, talking to Martin Lewis0 -
None of this is as sophisticated as something like the third-party PC fingerprinting system that Tesco Bank bought in to figure out whether you're on your regular PC.
You mean the one that simply places a checksummed cookie on your PC, and if the cookie is there and valid, you are using the same PC as before, otherwise you must be using a different PC. Use a different web browser or clear your cookies on browser close and it also assumes a different PC every time.0 -
Yes, since you ask. As a not very bright poorly-educated and naive member of the general public with little understanding of how things work, who finds life in general a bit of a struggle, I need my hand held with loads of things. And there are millions of us.
Well, maybe hundreds of thousands.
It comes back to a point that I've made on a previous thread; if you've chosen to mess around a bit at school, not put in the effort afterwards to catch up, and now can't quite be bothered to put in the extra time to check that you are doing things right, then yes, you'll struggle.
What you seem to want is that the world is changed so that everyone else picks up the pieces for you. Most peeple don't find that reasonable.0 -
Not as advertised then? I wonder if they know they haven't got what they've paid for? When the new website first appeared, they used to tell people this stuff wasn't working because they didn't have the right version of Flash installed.You mean the one that simply places a checksummed cookie on your PC, and if the cookie is there and valid, you are using the same PC as before, otherwise you must be using a different PC. Use a different web browser or clear your cookies on browser close and it also assumes a different PC every time."It will take, five, 10, 15 years to get back to where we need to be. But it's no longer the individual banks that are in the wrong, it's the banking industry as a whole." - Steven Cooper, head of personal and business banking at Barclays, talking to Martin Lewis0 -
It comes back to a point that I've made on a previous thread; if you've chosen to mess around a bit at school, not put in the effort afterwards to catch up, and now can't quite be bothered to put in the extra time to check that you are dooing things right, then yes, you'll struggle.
Oh, the irony.0 -
Tesco - and others use a special flash cookie - sometimes known as a super cookie.
They are not supposed to be deleted by normal cookie deletion managers/program etc
Flash Cookie manager
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager09.html0
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