MSE News: Sent money to the wrong account? Now it should be easier to get it back

I_luv_cats

DCFC79 wrote: »

Just set up a £1 payment to the account to pay and ask if the payment has been received and once its received you send the rest of the money across. Done this a couple of times over the last couple of years.

Done so myself when transferring money.


Also good idea with solicitor house purchase deposits etc.

(and circum-navigate when fraudsters fake a solicitors email and say the acct. number has changed)

Tragen

DCFC79 wrote: »

Just set up a £1 payment to the account to pay and ask if the payment has been received and once its received you send the rest of the money across. Done this a couple of times over the last couple of years.

Best off sending a random small amount, similar to what online payment services do. i.e. you send £0.52 - recipient needs to relay back the amount to you.

Personally, I think account numbers should probably be longer and significantly different from each other so that if you get one, maybe two numbers wrong, it'll simply not make its way to a valid account.

ceredigion

All right after reading comments I'll concede a three point validation using a name wont work.

colsten

Tragen wrote: »

Personally, I think account numbers should probably be longer

no, please don't..........I, along with many other people, already have enough trouble getting 8 digits right

masonic

Tragen wrote: »

Personally, I think account numbers should probably be longer and significantly different from each other so that if you get one, maybe two numbers wrong, it'll simply not make its way to a valid account.

If you include the sort code, the current system uses 14 digits. Even if every individual and business in the UK had 20 bank accounts it would still be possible to have 5 check digits. If 5 digits of redundancy across the system isn't enough to solve the problem, making them longer is unlikely to make any difference. The problem is that the distribution of accounts across the number space has not been designed with typo-protection in mind.

EarthBoy

colsten wrote: »

How would your software determine the difference between e.g. Mrs A R Smith and Mrs A Smith, who could be the same person or two totally different people?

It wouldn't differentiate, but it's very unlikely that two people with the same surname would have similar bank account numbers. If you entered account no. 12345678 with the name smith, and that account no. belonged to somebody called Jones, the system would reject the payment because of invalid details.

If you mistyped one digit and put 12345677 with Smith instead, it's unlikely that account no. would also belong to a Smith, so the payment would be rejected.

masonic

EarthBoy wrote: »

It wouldn't differentiate, but it's very unlikely that two people with the same surname would have similar bank account numbers. If you entered account no. 12345678 with the name smith, and that account no. belonged to somebody called Jones, the system would reject the payment because of invalid details.

If you mistyped one digit and put 12345677 with Smith instead, it's unlikely that account no. would also belong to a Smith, so the payment would be rejected.

How 'fuzzy' are you planning to make this name matching? - because people frequently misspell my surname, even after I've gone to great pains to spell it out for them.

It seems like what's being proposed is to rip out the current system and go with a redesign, which has its merits, but I can see the banks being reluctant to replace their infrastructure to accommodate the change - look how long it took them to implement a rather trivial change like faster payments.

I'd predict that initiatives like paym, which put a sticking plaster on the problem, look a lot more hopeful.

colsten

Glad you agree there is no foolproof way of checking the right recipient - not until we wire our brains to robots that function perfectly, and not until banks would have spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions to exchange the names of account holders, and to agree to a common format of storing account holder names (which might include that account names need to be changed). And you'd still not have a totally foolproof solution.

Hold all this against

• the fact that it's just a tiny number of payments that go wrong
• in 99.999999% of cases where payments go wrong, it's because the person sending the money typed a wrong number
• you can send a test payment of a few pence before you send your big wonga
• the simple solution in which people just send their money to the right numbers in the first place

and you, most likely, really don't want banks to spend even a penny on "fool proving" the receiving account information.

Eco_Miser

EarthBoy wrote: »

It wouldn't differentiate, but it's very unlikely that two people with the same surname would have similar bank account numbers. If you entered account no. 12345678 with the name smith, and that account no. belonged to somebody called Jones, the system would reject the payment because of invalid details.

If you mistyped one digit and put 12345677 with Smith instead, it's unlikely that account no. would also belong to a Smith, so the payment would be rejected.

They are likelier than you think - whole extended families tend to use the same bank, and with names like Smith or Patel or Wong there are going to be lots of similarly named complete strangers using the same branch.

rtho782

I'm closing my account with TSB over this.

While I get that this is being done with good intentions, the way TSB have phrased the changes to their terms and conditions is scary.

Effectively they remove all certainty of funds from my account. There is no time limit for a reclaim - it could be a decade later - and I have to prove that the funds were not sent in error or I pay back all the money, and any fees for arranged or unarranged overdrafts.

Let's say I sell someone my car today for £5,000. They send me the money via faster payments. 20 years later, they dispute the transaction, and the funds are taken away from me. How do I prove I sold a car 20 years ago?

Hell, even if I sold the car a week ago it could be hard for me to prove. "Here is a photo of the empty space my car would otherwise be in!"

This policy opens up the potential for a hell of a lot of fraud.

I realise that perhaps the bank would side with me in the above cases, but, "perhaps" is not good enough, and I should not have to potentially be without the cash for months while they decide on the dispute.

Worse, the way TSB word it, as soon as the sending bank disputes the transaction, the money is just gone from my account. So they don't even need to be told what is going on, the fraudster does not need to convince TSB, just their own bank.