missing money in a bank transfer

Violetcloud

Looking for advice. There were four large sums of money sent from Bank of America to four different UK accounts. Three arrived and one went missing. Two of these were to Nationwide accounts, one arrived, the other didn't. This happened four weeks ago and in that time there have been constant emails, phone calls between the people whose money is missing and Bank of Ameruca and Nationwide. In four weeks no one will own up to where the money is. Its as if it has disappeared into a black hole. How in this techno age can a bank tranfer of money just disappear and the banks just say 'we don't know where it is'. They said once that it went via HSBC, and was maybe stuck there, then denied this. It has caused huge stress to the person concerned, great expense and lots of time standing in their local Nationwide with no results. Bank staff just say 'this has never happened before'. Bank of America says its Nationwides fault and vice versa. If anyone has any helpful info to try and find this money so it can be credited to the right account, I would be immensly grateful because the family concerned are distraught and ill over it all.

robatwork

Firstly you should post in the Banking fourm if you want some real advice rather than just a vent

Budgeting & Bank Accounts — MoneySavingExpert Forum

I suggest you will need a lot more detail. For example were test payments made from BoA to the 4 accounts prior to the large sums?

It's almost certain the money will be somewhere, either in a suspense account (target account couldn't be reached) or awaiting fraud checks. Can the person who sent the money give a paper trail of its source?  Post on the forum above with these and any more details you can eg. times and dates of transactions, types of account and the info above. 

SiliconChip

I echo rob's advice to post on the Banking board, but as you haven't I'll make a comment here for now. It's very unlikely that Nationwide accept foreign payments direct from the originator, they will almost certainly use an intermediary bank, which could well be where HSBC has come into it. That adds time and complication to the process, so the payments may well still turn up. However, the other possibility is that they have been held up for anti-money laundering checks, and if so then you are not permitted to be told that's what's happening so could be why you are only getting vague responses.

Violetcloud

No BoA had not done test payments first, they were just given the account numbers and sent the money. Three payments arrived and the 4th didn't. BoA keep saying they cannot track the money, its over four weeks now. They are ignoring emails sent and the people keep being told, after speaking to one person, that they are not allowed to speak to them again.

It has just come to light after badgering Nationwide that a form MT103 may have been missing. (having looked this up I believe this form is used to track missing payments) When this info was fed back to BoA as a poossibility of the problem with the money not reaching its destination, they closed ranks again and were told they could no longer speak to the team they had been speaking to. Pretty weird behaviour considering they were supposed to be helpingn track the money.

Sicard

There is a middle-man bank when an international transfer takes place. I used to send money from Barclays in the UK to Barclays in Kenya (no direct connection) and it was HSBC who acted as the middle-man and once a transfer didn't happen but eventually the fault lay with HSBC. It took several days to fix. I assume because of Covid things like this take longer to sort out.
It's worth investigating HSBC if they are the Middle-man.

nyermen

Swift messages most definitely can be traced. There'll be swift ack's all over the place, unless the banks have deleted the records (despite being expected to keep them for 7 years for audit purposes).
Someone can confirm better (eg. eskbanker?  Its been a while since I dealt with payments) but as I remember if there was a correspondent bank in the middle, then there should be a cover message (202 COV?) as well.

The bank should be able to provide a copy of the message(s) for tracing. Quite often they get stuck at the correspondent (fraud checks?)

TripleH

1. If a transaction has been flagged as possible money laundering / fraud (even if it isn't), you might not be made aware of it being flagged and the funds may suddenly appear 1 day.

2. Unless things have changed a lot in 10 years, if a payment gets stuck it can be a manual process to fix it and you could just be an unfortunate transaction that gets stuck.

MSE_ForumTeam5

Moved to Budgeting and Bank Accounts board

mellonicoley

Hi OP, I recommend requesting the SWIFT MT103 message from Bank of America and passing it to Nationwide for them to attempt to trace the payment. Also raise a complaint with BoA; it does not sound like they could be helping as much as they could be. I have not dealt with them before but I have done a lot of international payments for my job. BoA should definitely at least be able to initiate a trace on the payment (which they might charge for).

The payment could be stuck with the intermediary (HSBC in this case) or BoA may not have even sent it (I have experienced this with another bank; took them 3 weeks to actually check and acknowledge that the payment was never sent, even though they debited our bank account).