CHAPS guarantee not worth the paper it's written on

born_again

What is odd is why the OP account was frozen. Given the wrong account details used by the party sending the money. Their bank should have used these details to contact the other bank. 

Sensory

Ergates said:

I don't think a complaint to the OPs own bank will get anywhere.  Yes, the fraud investigation was obviously unnecessary - but the OPs bank couldn't have known that.  They would have had a request from the in-laws bank through official channels, and have to treat such things as real.  Making a complaint to the In-laws bank probably won't go anywhere either as the OP isn't a customer there.

Is the receiving bank not allowed to ask questions, or do they simply freeze the account and have no say whilst a bunch of independent investigators make assumptions about payee details being accurate without actually checking anything? It's atrocious practice considering just how many professionals were involved and none of them were able to catch the error until it was far too late.

Ensuring payee details are correct is sending money 101, even a young child could do it. My 8 year-old nephew was able to manually enter a 32-character Wi-Fi password full of random upper and lowercase letters, plus numbers and symbols, including catching a K that should have been a k, and succeeded on his first attempt.

Two grown adults couldn't be bothered to check the details of a property transaction worth £70,000? The sending bank didn't bother to verify before opening up a fraud investigation? The receiving bank didn't or couldn't verify because they were slaves to said frivolous fraud investigation?

OP just sucks it up because systems are unfair?
That does suck.

Daliah

born_again said:

What is odd is why the OP account was frozen. Given the wrong account details used by the party sending the money. Their bank should have used these details to contact the other bank. 

There is likely to be more to the story than we know from this thread. I also suspect that the bank doesn't like the use of the personal account for business purposes.

Miles86

The other question in this is who are Bank A and why on earth are they accepting CHAPS payment instructions without at least validating the sort code and account number provided? Or even better using Confirmation of Payee. Avoid them, whoever they are!

paul_c123

A non-customer can raise a complaint with a bank and the bank have an obligation to investigate it properly just as they would with a customer's complaint.

Ergates

Sensory said:

Is the receiving bank not allowed to ask questions, or do they simply freeze the account and have no say whilst a bunch of independent investigators make assumptions about payee details being accurate without actually checking anything?

Think how often you hear stories (here and elsewhere) of cases of (actual) fraud - where even if the victim reports it within hours/minutes, by the time the receiving account is traced the money has already been moved on and is never seen again.   Given that, I would expect that if a bank receives an alert of "money has been fraudulently transferred to one of your customers accounts, here are the account details" they should act pretty damn fast.

If if was your money that was stolen, and the receiving bank were told whilst the money was still in the receiving account, but they did nothing, how happy would you be?

Ergates

Daliah said:

born_again said:

What is odd is why the OP account was frozen. Given the wrong account details used by the party sending the money. Their bank should have used these details to contact the other bank. 

There is likely to be more to the story than we know from this thread. I also suspect that the bank doesn't like the use of the personal account for business purposes.

In this case though - selling a property to a family member - this was personal use, so I very much doubt that would have any impact into the banks actions.

eskbanker

paul_c123 said:

A non-customer can raise a complaint with a bank and the bank have an obligation to investigate it properly just as they would with a customer's complaint.

While technically true that there are some scenarios in which a non-customer can complain, being the payee of a transaction (such as OP here) isn't one of them - they're defined at DISP 2.7.6 at https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/DISP/2/7.html

As Bank A correctly informed OP, they wouldn't be able to disclose anything to OP anyway, as the activity relating to the aborted transfer was all by someone else, and disclosure would breach the payer's data protection rights....

Sensory

Ergates said:

Sensory said:

Is the receiving bank not allowed to ask questions, or do they simply freeze the account and have no say whilst a bunch of independent investigators make assumptions about payee details being accurate without actually checking anything?

Think how often you hear stories (here and elsewhere) of cases of (actual) fraud - where even if the victim reports it within hours/minutes, by the time the receiving account is traced the money has already been moved on and is never seen again.   Given that, I would expect that if a bank receives an alert of "money has been fraudulently transferred to one of your customers accounts, here are the account details" they should act pretty damn fast.

If if was your money that was stolen, and the receiving bank were told whilst the money was still in the receiving account, but they did nothing, how happy would you be?

Irrelevant, because they froze the wrong account. How was the OP's account details actually obtained for it to be frozen? Obviously not by tracing the payment or auditing its trail. The in-laws could have had any random account frozen just by giving their bank a random 8-digit number of the receiving bank. You could freeze the account of your solicitor by reporting fraud, just because you entered one digit wrong when trying to pay them and they contacted you saying the money hadn't been received; that's how ridiculous this is. Bank B froze an account that didn't even receive the money, so on what authority can they freeze it? Can they freeze the account of Adele because some random person got luck with the numbers?

Daliah

Ergates said:

Daliah said:

born_again said:

What is odd is why the OP account was frozen. Given the wrong account details used by the party sending the money. Their bank should have used these details to contact the other bank. 

There is likely to be more to the story than we know from this thread. I also suspect that the bank doesn't like the use of the personal account for business purposes.

In this case though - selling a property to a family member - this was personal use, so I very much doubt that would have any impact into the banks actions.

Clearly these are two separate issues but the OP‘s bank will no doubt have had a closet look at the OP‘s account because of the missing money from the property sale. It is perfectly possible that in the process they noticed business transactions on the account. It is also perfectly possible that a lot more than we know did happen in the process