advice please!

eveyk

Hi

Hope its ok to post this here!
Just had a frantic phonecall from a friend asking for some advice(she knew I would use this forum!)

Basically from what I understand she shut a bank account down in 2003.
A year and a half ago she picked up a cheque book from the above account which she obviously thought was an another account which she still had open.

Since then she has written about £1700 worth of cheques thinking they were coming out of her current account when actually they were coming out of the old account she shut down. The bank had given her old details to a new customer so the money had been coming out of their account.

She only found out all this in a letter on sat morning and has now been asked to pay the money by friday. She obviously knows that she needs to pay it and admits she should have checked her bank statments regularly (not an MSEr eh?) but why do you think the bank have taken so long to get back to her? and do you think she needs to pay it all straight up?

We were meant to be going away this weekend with the girls but unfortunatley this has put a bit of a downer on things for her!

Thanks for taking the time to read

E x

debbie42

So, she's been drawing cheques on a closed account for 18 months? The cheques would have had her name on, so you'd have thought that the bank or the new customer would have spotted the error ages ago.

I haven't a clue about the legalities, I'm afraid, but if it was me I'd accept that I needed to pay the funds back, once the mistake had been identified, but ask for longer to pay it back, if the funds weren't easily available.