How do I minimise the risk of having my bank account locked?

pbartlett

I have done this in the (recent) past. The money was in my current account. I went into the branch in person with my ID and asked the lady there to CHAPS the money there and then to my solicitor - which she did.

It was Lloyds - they ID'd me by asking me to put my debit card in the slot and enter the PIN (just for an ID check - nothing to do with the transfer). I also had my passport.

[Deleted User]

northwalesd said:

Deleted_User said:

Deleted_User said:

If it's coming from an ISA, I wouldn't be concerned. It's when you receive large or odd transactions from individuals that banks tend to worry.

I know this is anecdotal, but the fraud prevention measures appear to be a lot more sensitive than this in my experience. I've twice had accounts locked in the last year just from making transfers between my own accounts that were all under £5,000. I managed to unlock them but it took several hours on the phone each time. These weren't particularly odd transactions, I was simply moving savings from one account to another after an interest rate cut. It was just a case of computer says no and even the person at Lloyds that I spoke to the first time couldn't really understand why it had been flagged.

I'm not complaining about this incidentally, I understand why banks are trying to stop fraud, I'm just saying that the OP is probably right to be concerned that this could be an issue.

I think that. to a certain extent, backs up teh [post fro zx81 as your transfers are ccoming from individual accounts rather than a financial institution.

FWIW I transferred £15k from a S&S ISA into my current account last year to part fund a house extension, not a peep from my bank (Lloyds).

The problem I have with this idea is that what you tend to get is people claiming they know how the system works and that if you "just don't do X then you have nothing to be worried about". My experience and everything I've read about this recently suggests that's probably a pretty dated approach at this point.

In reality, these account freezes are done by machine learning. The system gets trained using historical datasets and creates a model to screen for fraudulent transactions which is then retrained over time with new data. Thresholds can be set that are more or less sensitive and banks have a stake in making them more sensitive given a false positive costs them far less than a false negative does. As such, the idea it's as easy as "anything coming from an ISA is fine" is likely to be a pretty wild simplification.

Hence why, as in the FT article I posted above, there have been huge numbers of complaints recently about people getting frozen out of their accounts when they haven't done anything that's particularly suspicious (as in my case). The reality is that unless we have an AI genius on here, none of us know how these things actually work, all we can do is try to avoid obvious red flags and hope for the best. And for that reason, I think the OP is right to be cautious about this and take some precautions rather than having a blasé attitude about it.