Post office online saver (26) withdrawal error message

veryintrigued

Anyone else suffer from the following error message on this account for a couple of weeks?

Transfer cannot be applied at this time.

I'm loathed to contact P.O. as I have quite a few other Online Savers (where I can withdraw from fine) and don't want to highlight myself to them too much.

I think the Post Office Bank and Virgin Banks IT departments try and out do each other in ineptitude.

xylophone

I'm loathed

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me....?:)

SnowTiger

veryintrigued wrote: »

Anyone else suffer from the following error message on this account for a couple of weeks?

Transfer cannot be applied at this time.

I'm loathed to contact P.O. as I have quite a few other Online Savers (where I can withdraw from fine) and don't want to highlight myself to them too much.

I think the Post Office Bank and Virgin Banks IT departments try and out do each other in ineptitude.

IIRC I received that (or a similar) message for a few days after changing my linked account. That's probably not the cause of it in you case.

Can you transfer the money to another of your Post Office savings accounts and withdraw it from there as a workaround?

veryintrigued

SnowTiger wrote: »

IIRC I received that (or a similar) message for a few days after changing my linked account. That's probably not the cause of it in you case.

Can you transfer the money to another of your Post Office savings accounts and withdraw it from there as a workaround?

Thanks for the excellent reply - which I hadn't tried.

Now I have and I get a different error message of:

Selected account is blocked from being debited - please try another account

You couldn't make it up!

Klopek

What was the outcome with regards to the 'blocked from being debited' error message?

I am receiving this on only one of my accounts. It is the only account I have ever deposited money to with a debit card. Perhaps this is linked? While funds are available, perhaps some kind of hold remains in place for a period of time after the deposit?

Ed-1

Post Office Online Saver works fine if you leave everything as it is when you open it. After that, changing anything like linked account or using a debit card to put money in it can block the account from withdrawals. You then have to ring them to get the account released. If you have more than one, they'll generally insist the others be closed as a precondition to unlocking it.

quirkydeptless

Ed-1 said:

Post Office Online Saver works fine if you leave everything as it is when you open it. After that, changing anything like linked account or using a debit card to put money in it can block the account from withdrawals. You then have to ring them to get the account released. If you have more than one, they'll generally insist the others be closed as a precondition to unlocking it.

That was my theory too, and that a lot of the PO savings woes were to do with having more than one account. This wasn't meant to be allowed, but it wasn't enforced by their system, and also not properly supported, so fell down rat holes trying to do even some basic stuff.

A while back I cut down to having just the one, but still having got "technical difficulties" on that, closed it Today.

Last straw was being unable to cancel a direct debit (it would just log me out), contacting customer support who said it would be sorted, and then finding out it hadn't been cancelled.

hgt

quirkydeptless said:

Last straw was being unable to cancel a direct debit (it would just log me out), contacting customer support who said it would be sorted, and then finding out it hadn't been cancelled.

I've had that same issue too, I can no longer cancel DDs on any of my (5) Post Office accounts. Now what I do is cancel the DD at the bank I'm pulling the money from... then within a month PO write to me to tell me my DD has failed so they've cancelled it!

PRAISETHESUN

Stuff like this is the reason I moved away from PO Savings for DDs. The system works fine, but when something goes wrong it's a pain sort out. As above most of my issues were when I had multiple accounts of the same issue - usually the second I opened of a given issue (or occasionally both) ended up getting that error. 

As above the way to sort the "blocked from being debited" error is to give them a call - there's no way to sort it on your end. If you leave it as it you can still pull money in, but then you can't get it out again. Eventually if you leave it alone long enough your account goes dormant and they should write to you to close it due to inactivity. If this happens the money should be moved back to your linked account, provided the DD mandate is still active. In my instance however it didn't so I ended up sending a strongly worded letter to their customer service office and eventually the money got returned without much effort apart from waiting.