Accidently sent £250 to the wrong account.

robatwork

Uxb wrote: »

But I imagine we will never get to hear the result as this thread like so many before with exactly the same scenario will just peter out with no discernible result.

Exactly this. This scenario must happen every day multiple times. Yet there seems only anecdotal evidence of what happens in the end, and not much of that. Not much court action either considering its regularity.

My gut feeling is that banks are paying back clients from a slush fund rather than doing full investigations and possible court action. Which opens up all sorts of fraudulent opportunities.

katejo

In the future always send a tiny amount (£1?) and check that it has arrived safely before sending the remaining balance. I always do this if I have never previously transferred to the same account.


If I were to receive such a payment in error, I would always inform the bank concerned.

unforeseen

Uxb wrote: »

Well I assume the OP can 'prove' to which account they were intending to transfer and also they know which account it did go to.

In the end if the wrongful recipient wishes to still act stupid and not return the monies the next stage (unless you wish to write off the money) is as follows:
You apply to the courts for what is now called a "Norwich Pharmacal" legal order to be imposed on the Bank(s) concerned.
This compels the bank to provide the information about the end receiver and their details/contacts points etc.
Then you take the end receiver to court and inform the police of the wrongful credit offense under the Theft Act.

This all costs money of course and needs legal advice prior and takes time.

In the event that the bank gets notice that a NP order is being sought from them you can bet your bottom dollar that the matter would be sorted out PDQ like overnight as the bank would end up being required by the courts to attend and provide lots of data and explanations as to what happened and what did they do/not do.
I also suspect the end recipient might suddenly have an "attitude re-adjustment" and become rather more cooperative rather quickly.

Edit: As to what might happen if the receiving account was in debt and the bank took the money to recover some of that debt I've no idea at all.....

If the bank get an NPO then the OP will already be a few thousand pounds down that he can't reclaim from anybody.

Applicant normally pays respondent's costs in an NPO case which cannot be reclaimed.

Abbey1991

w00519772 wrote: »

This happened to me with HSBC as well. However, it was their fault.

At first they said I made a mistake and transferred £50 to the wrong account and it could take a long time to get it back. However, I told them that I took a screenshot of the transaction (which I always do). They agreed to look into it straight away. Two hours later I received a call saying the money was back in my account and they acknowledged it was their fault.

How did they mess this up? Very worrying, I thought all these cases were "user error".

lush_walrus

Abbey1991 wrote: »

How did they mess this up? Very worrying, I thought all these cases were "user error".

We had this happen to our business account with Santander. We made two payments in one day, one to someone we pay regularly and one to someone new. Both payments did not make it to the intended account.

We thought this odd that our accountant made two errors in one day such as this. So had a look, our accountant had paid one from a saved set of details and one was typed in by them. Santander were telling us both were our error. Telling us they would recover the money but we would have to pay for the transaction again I think we paid 12 per transaction from them at the time. Well clearly our accountant hadn't made a mistake with one as it was a payment we had made successfully over and over and the details were saved and unaltered. So we argued that, the other we had no proof so we had to pay for that transaction again.

We asked how a saved set of information can become incorrect, Santander told us although the details are saved on internet banking, this sends an instruction to Santander only, it goes no further than them. They then manually type those details in again to make the final transaction so this is where in this case the error came in, a member of their staff typing it in. Our suspicions were we had entered both correctly but only had proof for one transaction, so had to pay the transfer fee for the other. We did get the money that had been transferred in both cases back. We paid the fee and angry with their errror and the two months it took to deal with their error we closed our business account with them. And later took our personal accounts out of their bank too, but that's a different matter.

In our case yes we did get the money transferred to an incorrect account back it took a while but did come back.