Absolutely furious and upset

loveandlight

You must get yourself some good quality legal advice about this. This is serious and you have to talk to people who are in the know and who'll be able to help you. The sooner the better!

Curv

inmypocketnottheirs wrote: »

If both banks are refusing to help, then ask them for the name and address of the person that has had the credit to their account. Then write and ask for your money back within 7 days. If not received commence court proceedings.

If they won't hand it over, just have a good old rummage through their bins... that's more likely to turn the information up than the banks are :rolleyes:

loopydonna

Just an update.

The Financial Ombudsman has written to Capital One, along with another letter from me asking them to return my money to me.

Amazingly Capital One have remembered about a rule that allows them to write to the cardholder and tell them that if they cannot prove the money is theirs within 14 days, Capital One will remove it from their account and return it to me. So I should get my money back in about 2-3 weeks time.

It's a shame they couldn't have done this back at the beginning of June when I first discovered the mistake :rolleyes:

Hopefully it'll be resolved soon though.

loveandlight

Amazingly Capital One have remembered about a rule that allows them to write to the cardholder and tell them that if they cannot prove the money is theirs within 14 days, Capital One will remove it from their account and return it to me. So I should get my money back in about 2-3 weeks time.

That's excellent news. I was just thinking about you this morning and wondering how you were getting on. I knew it was possible for them to do something because of the experiences my niece told me about at the Royal Bank of Scotland ( you know, when she put a million pounds too much into someone's account and the bank just shrugged their shoulders and said they wrongly credit all the time and just dip in and get the money back again.)
Good luck.

Dylanwing

Great news, I hope that you get it back soon. Funny how the FO managed to jog the memory of Capital One staff!

isofa

What a crazy situation, can't believe it can occur, everyone makes typos on-line and it's so easy to mistype a card number. I think both parties could have offered more assistance - is very poor service, regardless of data protection (a very ropey "law" at the best of times) - they don't mind breaching it by dumping sacks of non-shredded documents on the pavements, as many television documentaries have shown.

I hope you get it resolved now the FO is involved - pity it has to come to that.

Surely the other person having the money is theft and all banks can trace transactions. What a bizarre world.

Might be worth writing into the Money section of the Sunday Times, the columnist is excellent at chasing incompetent banks, after all they owe you a good will payment for all the anguish too.

Grade_A_Reject

Credit cards have a built in check digit to avoid transposition errors so you must have been very unlucky transposing two numbers and coming up with a valid one.

It might be worthwhile checking that the card number Capital One are supposed to have credited accidentally is actually valid and they're not just leading you a merry dance.

The maths behind calculating the check digit can be found here http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~bradbury/checkdigit/creditcardcheck.htm

and, if your name's not Carol Vorderman, there's an online validation utility written in Java here http://javascript.internet.com/forms/val-credit-card.html

loopydonna

A friend works in software and knows how the check digit system works. He though the same, but I gave him both card numbers and he confirmed that both are valid card numbers.

They also both work on the link you supplied.

It seems I've been very unlucky, but I'll be extremely careful in future!

nrsql

Unfortunately most credit card check didgits are a bit simplistic.
If you had one that follows the linked algorithm you had a one in 10 chance of hitting a valid card number and if they allocate in numerical order (poor practise) that would be likely to have been allocated.

wannabedebtfree_2

Having worked in the finance industry, I know that this mistake should and could be rectified immediately, long gone are the days when "bank error in your favour collect £50" still stands, and all they have to do is write to the person explaining the error, (they have transaction records so they know its an error) and withdraw the money.

This happened once when I working, a customer came in and said....."errrr........can you check my balance, the cash point machine was wrong!" So I checked, and said, "yep, your wages of £XXX.XX have gone in, and a further income of £55k+ has gone in", the customer shuffled about a bit and said "thats not mine!" so I rang Head office, they checked with the CHAPS run and found that the account number was a digit wrong, I had to withdraw it from the account and credit it immediately to the correct account (and this was all done while I was on the phone to HO, they had checked the CHAPS run, called the branch that the transaction had been done by, and it was sorted in about 10 minutes)

Why it should be any different in this scenario is beyond me, I would go to the ombudsman. ooops, just read page 2........missed that.....glad its all getting sorted now!!