Sent money to the wrong bank account? You’ll soon get more help getting it back

Archi_Bald

!!!!!! wrote: »

Vocalink is ambiguous because it is not their process.

I think you will find Vocalink have developed, and are running, the central Faster Payment infrastructure.

!!!!!! wrote: »

The big problem with any use of names is that they are neither unique nor consistent even for one person. Would there need to be an entry for each permutation/spelling of a person's name?

You have misinterpreted my comments. I have never said that the account name should be checked by any system. I absolutely agree with you, the literally infinite permutations make any automatic checking basically impossible. However, displaying the recipient's account name could help the person sending money. E.g. if you see that the payment goes to a Mr Smith when you want to pay a Mr Jones would be additional, meaningful information. This additional information wouldn't guarantee that no payments ever get made to the wrong place, but it would help a lot, IMO.

System

FormulaDriven wrote: »

Yes, but you could use it as validation. If payee is stated by payer to be "MR SMITH", and the receiving bank can see that the account details relate to "A B Jones", then it would be quite possible to program the software to flag a lack of matching strings and ping a query back before the payment is made.

How do you decide on the length of the matching string? 2 letters, 3 letters, more? What do you do if no name is included?

'I put MR SMITH but the system says AB JONES. I thought Andrea's surname was Smith' Where do you go from there? Ring Andrea to find out? 'Oh yes I didn't change the account name from my maiden name'

I think this will introduce a hell of a lot more problems than it is trying to solve.

System

Archi_Bald wrote: »

I think you will find Vocalink have developed, and are running, the central Faster Payment infrastructure.


You have misinterpreted my comments. I have never said that the account name should be checked by any system. I absolutely agree with you, the literally infinite permutations make any automatic checking basically impossible. However, displaying the recipient's account name could help the person sending money. E.g. if you see that the payment goes to a Mr Smith when you want to pay a Mr Jones would be additional, meaningful information. This additional information wouldn't guarantee that no payments ever get made to the wrong place, but it would help a lot, IMO.

See my reply above

joolsey

Hello all,

May I ask for some advice regarding an actual situation?

My daughter is in her second year at Uni, and accidentally transposed a couple of digits when transferring her rent to her landlord....to the tune of £900 now sitting in some random person's bank account.

My daughter called her bank (Co-Op) who advised that the money had gone to Barclays. Barclays have said that they will not release the name of the person to my daughter due to DPA and moreover have sent her a very confusing letter to advise a number of things that she needs to do to try to reclaim the money back which was not in any way helpful.

She has an appointment at the Citizens Advice for tomorrow but I wondered if anyone can guide us through where to go with this to try to recover the money as quickly as possible?
Unfortunately her landlord is not being terribly understanding about her predicament which I do understand and whilst she has made arrangements to pay him in the interim this is a heck of a lot of money to her and we would be grateful for any advice to help get her out of this pickle.

I found the posts on here very interesting especially:

"The recipient commits the crime of "theft by finding" if he fails to return money that he knows to have been provided in error. The sender merely has to make a complaint to the police with the receiving sort-code and account number, and the police will contact the recipient of the funds and investigate the circumstances of the transaction."

However if Barclays will not release the information regarding the random recipient how are we to give the police the details? I have been advised that there is a portal on line for taking people to the small claims court so is it a good idea to take Barclays to court to get the name and details of the random recipient or is this a bad idea?

As you can see....quite a pickle!
All help gratefully received
Thanks

Consumerist

joolsey wrote: »

"The recipient commits the crime of "theft by finding" if he fails to return money that he knows to have been provided in error. The sender merely has to make a complaint to the police with the receiving sort-code and account number, and the police will contact the recipient of the funds and investigate the circumstances of the transaction."

I'm no expert but if you give the police the sort code and account number to which the money was transferred in error then I would expect the police to get the recipient's name and address from the bank.

Edit
My personal view is that if you advise Barclays that you are referring the matter to the police, they may become a bit more helpful. Only a guess, you understand.

Sir_Alan

Archi_Bald wrote: »

There is one very big database with every bank account in the country.

Ok, so you don't know how Faster Payments works. A customer at Bank A wishes to send a payment to a customer at Bank B. Bank A asks Bank B whether they will accept the payment; Bank B checks to see if the account exists, is open, and can accept external payments; if all is well, then Bank B tells Bank A that the transaction is accepted. Otherwise it is rejected (with a reason code). No Very Large Database is involved.

Regarding the number of arguments that you say can be made for and against: I have made the ones for. Can you make the ones against? Genuine question - I might have overlooked some showstoppers.

Ooh, I wonder who that bank account belongs to? I know - I will send them 1p and they will display the name. Or, I will send them £1 and then claim it back as an error: now their bank must give me the account holder's name and address. Two showstoppers right there, as far as I am concerned.

Archi_Bald

Not my problem if you choose to only partially quote what I was saying about the database which does exist. Some banks even mention the database in their T&Cs:

We will register your selected account details and mobile telephone number on a Database operated on behalf of all participating banks and building societies by a company called Vocalink Limited (Database)....<snip> ... bank will obtain details of your account by looking up your mobile telephone number on the Database so that they can send a payment to you

Sir_Alan wrote: »

I will send them 1p and they will display the name.

Well, they display the name for PAYM, so why not also for FPs? No particular reason for that not to be possible since PAYM does use the FP infrastructure, so FP can also read the database that contains sort code, account number, and account name.

Sir_Alan wrote: »

Or, I will send them £1 and then claim it back as an error: now their bank must give me the account holder's name and address.

Not sure how the address comes into it, or the claim back. Nobody has mentioned that before.

scott_tracy

What I always do is transfer an initial payment for a small amount and get the recipient to confirm they have received it. In doing this my online banking system saves the details so once they are confirmed it's easy to transfer the balance. I know it's a bit cumbersome having to do it twice but I figure that's vastly preferable to sending money to the wrong account. I've never had any problem doing this with any company I've dealt with. Anyway just a suggestion.

anotheruser

This is where our society is breaking down.

I made a mistake sending money?
Someone else must help me get it back.

OR just double check, triple check before sending money?

gmelvin

The article states you should contact your bank but they can't do anything. This week I sent a payment to the wrong person. Admittedly it was entirely my fault - I picked the wrong payee from my list of payees and wasn't really concentrating. I realised immediately and phoned the bank within 10 seconds. Barclays said they could not do anything and that due to 'faster payments' it had already been paid. I had to contact the person which of course I could since I knew who it was and they have agreed to pay it back.

However if you just enter the wrong numbers and don't know the name of the account holder then the bank can't give you the details of the account holder since that is violation of DPA.