LBG closing all my accounts on 18th May

Band7

Bridlington1 said:

I now declare that from this day forth a state of war exists between Bridlington1 and Al Rayan bank.

Good grief.

masonic

Speculator said:

pecunianonolet said:

pecunianonolet said:

Based on my rather long post a few pages back outlining OH and I had basically the same activity with Lloyds what concerns switches and account openings. I got the nasty letter from Halifax that they don't want me as customer, OH got the Halifax switch incentive this morning  OH switched a Lloyds account to Halifax.

I think the reason why Halifax doesn't want me must have other underlying reasons, and presume this has to do with the credit file. Let's see what digging in my reports with CIFAS uncovers. 

So, CIFAS results are here. Was searched by Al Ryan on 13th March. Exact same entry as @Bridlington1 posted previously. 

So I was right?

Looks like Halifax/Lloyds are closing accounts of people who had a CIFAS search by Al Ryan or is it still a coincidence?

Like I said earlier, might be a good idea to close your Al Ryan account (especially if you have Halifax/Lloyds/BOS accounts) before Al Ryan do a random CIFAS search.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and speculate that Al Rayan have been routinely searching CIFAS for many of its customers around this time. Probably including me and others posting to this thread. Yet only two people have suffered at the hands of LBG.

Bridlington1 said:

This is too much of a coincidence to ignore now.

Yes, 2 in 90,000 customers impacted so far. It can't have anything to do with taking the mickey regarding use of your accounts and must be the result of an external event that was beyond your control

Now riddle yourself this... how did LBG come to know about the Al Rayan CIFAS search within days of it happening unless they searched too? Are you of the belief Al Rayan lied to you about the search not being shared and CIFAS fraudulently altered the DSAR to hide a LBG search from you?

Bridlington1 said:
The £million question now is how the devil does one go about getting a CIFAS search removed?

Why would that be of any benefit? A search is just a record that someone checked their database using your details for warnings or markers against you. You've been told by a member organisation, who should be in a position to know, that it isn't shared with others who perform searches. You have no record of LBG having performed a search recently, so even if other searches are shared along with warnings and markers when an organisation performs a search as part of an account application or account monitoring, there's no clear route for LBG to have obtained this information. Even if they did, it is evidence of what exactly, that you have a relationship with a Sharia Compliant bank? Do you think LBG are persecuting you because of assumptions they've made about your religion?

If you want to dispute the information that Al Rayan searched CIFAS on that particular date, you could do so here, note that the first step is to pursue a complaint against the firm responsible. You might need clarification about that, because it was probably CIFAS itself that recorded the search, and they probably have evidence Al Rayan did indeed carry out said search.

I think maybe it is time to step back, take a few deep breaths and consider how silly this is becoming.

GingerTim

Band7 said:

pecunianonolet said:

pecunianonolet said:

Based on my rather long post a few pages back outlining OH and I had basically the same activity with Lloyds what concerns switches and account openings. I got the nasty letter from Halifax that they don't want me as customer, OH got the Halifax switch incentive this morning  OH switched a Lloyds account to Halifax.

I think the reason why Halifax doesn't want me must have other underlying reasons, and presume this has to do with the credit file. Let's see what digging in my reports with CIFAS uncovers. 

So, CIFAS results are here. Was searched by Al Ryan on 13th March. Exact same entry as @Bridlington1 posted previously. 

Tinfoil hats on.

Fixed that for you!

dealyboy

Band7 said:

Bridlington1 said:

I now declare that from this day forth a state of war exists between Bridlington1 and Al Rayan bank.

Good grief.

... no tactical nuclear weapons to @pecunianonolet now.

Bridlington1

masonic said:

Speculator said:

pecunianonolet said:

pecunianonolet said:

Based on my rather long post a few pages back outlining OH and I had basically the same activity with Lloyds what concerns switches and account openings. I got the nasty letter from Halifax that they don't want me as customer, OH got the Halifax switch incentive this morning  OH switched a Lloyds account to Halifax.

I think the reason why Halifax doesn't want me must have other underlying reasons, and presume this has to do with the credit file. Let's see what digging in my reports with CIFAS uncovers. 

So, CIFAS results are here. Was searched by Al Ryan on 13th March. Exact same entry as @Bridlington1 posted previously. 

So I was right?

Looks like Halifax/Lloyds are closing accounts of people who had a CIFAS search by Al Ryan or is it still a coincidence?

Like I said earlier, might be a good idea to close your Al Ryan account (especially if you have Halifax/Lloyds/BOS accounts) before Al Ryan do a random CIFAS search.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and speculate that Al Rayan have been routinely searching CIFAS for many of its customers around this time. Probably including me and others posting to this thread. Yet only two people have suffered at the hands of LBG.

Bridlington1 said:

This is too much of a coincidence to ignore now.

Yes, 2 in 90,000 customers impacted so far. It can't have anything to do with taking the mickey regarding use of your accounts and must be the result of an external event that was beyond your control

Now riddle yourself this... how did LBG come to know about the Al Rayan CIFAS search within days of it happening unless they searched too? Are you of the belief Al Rayan lied to you about the search not being shared and CIFAS fraudulently altered the DSAR to hide a LBG search from you?

Bridlington1 said:
The £million question now is how the devil does one go about getting a CIFAS search removed?

Why would that be of any benefit? A search is just a record that someone checked their database using your details for warnings or markers against you. You've been told by a member organisation, who should be in a position to know, that it isn't shared with others who perform searches. You have no record of LBG having performed a search recently, so even if other searches are shared along with warnings and markers when an organisation performs a search as part of an account application or account monitoring, there's no clear route for LBG to have obtained this information. Even if they did, it is evidence of what exactly, that you have a relationship with a Sharia Compliant bank? Do you think LBG are persecuting you because of assumptions they've made about your religion?

If you want to dispute the information that Al Rayan searched CIFAS on that particular date, you could do so here, note that the first step is to pursue a complaint against the firm responsible. You might need clarification about that, because it was probably CIFAS itself that recorded the search, and they probably have evidence Al Rayan did indeed carry out said search.

I think maybe it is time to step back, take a few deep breaths and consider how silly this is becoming.

My apologies you are right, I over reacted. This week has been quite stressful for me and I've ended up putting the situation out of all proportion and become slightly paranoid as a result. Thank you for bringing me back to my senses. 

I think the thing that threw me is that if the CIFAS search was just a routine search then why wouldn't any of the other banks have done one on me at some point in the past? Also it was the fact that the first person I spoke to at Al Rayan didn't seem to have heard of CIFAS so that made me inclined to doubt the reliability of the answer provided to me by the second call handler. I appreciate now that this can be explained by the fact that the first call handler may simply have been inexperienced but the second was not.

Plus given the hassle that CIFAS can cause and my lack of knowledge around them I wrongly jumped to the conclusion that a CIFAS search could have triggered the accounts review somehow. This misconception I think was exasperated by the fact that it was 2 months since I last did anything I would consider out of the ordinary with LBG in the form of opening those EA savings accounts plus current accounts in January so would have thought if they were going to close the accounts based on me abusing their systems it would have come around then.

This has become silly now and I am ashamed at that fact. I hope this'll teach me to always make sure I'm thinking rationally before posting!

gwapenut

> So it looks like Al Rayan were talking nonsense when they said that the search would not be seen by other lenders.

That's quite a leap. I think routine CIFAS searches are normal. This is why Coventry have recenty shut the doors on one forum user, because infrmation from CIFAS came to light (rightly or wrongly).

Yes, both users had searches from Al Rayan. But we're missing the elephant in the room, which is that many more LBG customers have Al Rayan accounts too, and yet only those customers who operate their banking relationship in a pushing the boundaries manner have been asked to leave the premises.

I'm not judging how the relationship was operated - it's all perfectly legal. I'm simply saying it's more probable that the unusual modus operandi triggered the prbolems, than CIFAS breaching the confidentiality of Al Rayan's search.

masonic

Bridlington1 said:

I think the thing that threw me is that if the CIFAS search was just a routine search then why wouldn't any of the other banks have done one on me at some point in the past?

On this point, you can be certain that this Al Rayan search is not the only search ever to be carried out against your details. Therefore the information about searches is incomplete. This suggests the details of other searches fell outside the scope of your request. This could be because the data was not stored by CIFAS at the time of your request. They may only store records of searches for a limited period of time or record only the most recent search. It seems very unlikely there would have been any searches after Al Rayan's if that was the only one returned by the DSAR.

This would all be consistent with the assertion that searches do not form part of the data collected and shared with member institutions.

Bridlington1

gwapenut said:

> So it looks like Al Rayan were talking nonsense when they said that the search would not be seen by other lenders.

That's quite a leap. I think routine CIFAS searches are normal. This is why Coventry have recenty shut the doors on one forum user, because infrmation from CIFAS came to light (rightly or wrongly).

Yes, both users had searches from Al Rayan. But we're missing the elephant in the room, which is that many more LBG customers have Al Rayan accounts too, and yet only those customers who operate their banking relationship in a pushing the boundaries manner have been asked to leave the premises.

I'm not judging how the relationship was operated - it's all perfectly legal. I'm simply saying it's more probable that the unusual modus operandi triggered the prbolems, than CIFAS breaching the confidentiality of Al Rayan's search.

We'd probably me in the territory of kangaroos on pogo sticks with the size of that leap. I appreciate now that the entire post that that quote originated from was complete gibberish though and I apologise for that. I shalln't remove the post as it would put parts of the thread out of context but sincerely with I hadn't posted it in the first place.

I did push the boundaries too far with LBG and looking back especially at the events of January in particular I'm surprised it took them so long to get rid of me. Then again hindsight is a wonderful thing and my reasoning for those months and years was that as I had never broken any rules other than the renewing of the regular saver loophole. Even then I reasoned at the time that countless others on this forum have been doing it for ages and have never had any issues so therefore it would be ok and thought that they'd give some sort of warning shot such as not letting me open new current accounts or whatever before fully ejecting me.

Plus after having my HSBC account frozen for 23 days in February 2022, followed by a freeze the following month by Virgin I had foolishly assumed that a bank would be most likely to close my accounts only if they suspected me of fraud/money laundering and even then this would come after a lengthy account freeze. This assumption I think fed into my skittishness around CIFAS. 

masonic said:

Bridlington1 said:

I think the thing that threw me is that if the CIFAS search was just a routine search then why wouldn't any of the other banks have done one on me at some point in the past?

On this point, you can be certain that this Al Rayan search is not the only search ever to be carried out against your details. Therefore the information about searches is incomplete. This suggests the details of other searches fell outside the scope of your request. This could be because the data was not stored by CIFAS at the time of your request. They may only store records of searches for a limited period of time or record only the most recent search. It seems very unlikely there would have been any searches after Al Rayan's if that was the only one returned by the DSAR.

This would all be consistent with the assertion that searches do not form part of the data collected and shared with member institutions.

This certainly seems the most logical explanation. It would be interesting to find out exactly how long they store information regarding searches. If anyone has a definitive answer that would be much appreciated.

I think it was just bad timing in many ways. If the dates had been reversed, i.e. account closure decision on 13th and CIFAS search on 15th I would have reacted much more sensibly than I did on this one.

Sea_Shell

Frequentlyhere said:

@Bridlington1



Upon research, I found that they apparently 'don't like' P2P lending, of which i had been doing heavily and ironically by March 2020 was barely doing at all - not that it should be a problem, of course, as it's a perfectly legitimiate FCA regulated activity.

I've got my Loanpad P2P account linked to my Club Lloyds.   Hope they don't take a "dislike" to it.

dealyboy

@Bridlington1 ...

Don't be too hard on yourself, you've been a trailblazer for many of us.

Qui onques rien n'enprist riens n'achieva.