Children's Bonds - NS&I Scam - 1990's

primary1

Casatigeo said:

In the early 1990's my wife and I invested a few thousand pounds from the little we had at the time in Children's Bonds for each of our daughters. 

Now they are in their early 30's and needing some funds for the next stage of their lives we decided it was a good time to cash in the bonds. 

It is not easy to apply for a repayment - however after completing the lengthy form and with evidence of the original investment we applied for repayment for one daughter - only to receive a letter last week advising they had already repaid the bond. This in untrue - they letter claims 'this is based on information on their computer files' however two paragraphs later NS&I state they have not retained documents to prove this and then went on to explain it is not fair to the tax payer to keep detailed records or ask them to search and prove this! 

I have had to lodge a complaint to try and start the process for repayment. Although we have not moved for 30 + years the correspondence from NS&I has been nonexistent since 1997 on this topic. 

Has anyone else had this experience and solved it positively? Thanks JC

Hi - We received an identical letter and recently made positive progress.

We called the phone number on the letter at 1pm this last Saturday afternoon. After instructing the AI 5 or 6 times "speak to an agent" we were put through to a helpful human lady. She asked lots of questions that proved she was looking at our various addresses over 25 years (some in the USA), seemed satisfied with our responses, and strongly implied our details were all good - though told us she couldn't say it explicitly.  She told us she would have our claim with their finance people today. 

The letter was disgraceful but credit to them for picking up the phone on a weekend. I'll come back and confirm if and when we receive the funds. 

xylophone

Furthermore, such costs are even less defensive 

???? Defensible?

sidtheglass

We have received an almost identical letter from NSandI saying that the Bond has already been repaid (it hasn't!) and saying they have no records available. They end the letter with an incredibly insulting "I realise you may be disappointed by my reply, I am sorry I cannot be of more help" This last comment appears to be designed to draw a line under the whole business and I have to wonder how many other people have also received letters like this and have just "given up". We, however, will not be giving up, I have written back to NSandI and, if the issue is not resolved quickly, I will take it to the Financial Ombudsman. I would be interested to know how other people have managed to resolve (successfully?) this issue.

ClementineH

primary1 said:

Casatigeo said:

In the early 1990's my wife and I invested a few thousand pounds from the little we had at the time in Children's Bonds for each of our daughters. 

Now they are in their early 30's and needing some funds for the next stage of their lives we decided it was a good time to cash in the bonds. 

It is not easy to apply for a repayment - however after completing the lengthy form and with evidence of the original investment we applied for repayment for one daughter - only to receive a letter last week advising they had already repaid the bond. This in untrue - they letter claims 'this is based on information on their computer files' however two paragraphs later NS&I state they have not retained documents to prove this and then went on to explain it is not fair to the tax payer to keep detailed records or ask them to search and prove this! 

I have had to lodge a complaint to try and start the process for repayment. Although we have not moved for 30 + years the correspondence from NS&I has been nonexistent since 1997 on this topic. 

Has anyone else had this experience and solved it positively? Thanks JC

Hi - We received an identical letter and recently made positive progress.

We called the phone number on the letter at 1pm this last Saturday afternoon. After instructing the AI 5 or 6 times "speak to an agent" we were put through to a helpful human lady. She asked lots of questions that proved she was looking at our various addresses over 25 years (some in the USA), seemed satisfied with our responses, and strongly implied our details were all good - though told us she couldn't say it explicitly.  She told us she would have our claim with their finance people today. 

The letter was disgraceful but credit to them for picking up the phone on a weekend. I'll come back and confirm if and when we receive the funds. 

Exactly the same here. I received the same dismissive letter & the ombudsman is also agreeing with them. I absolutely have not received my money, but they claim it was repaid in 1994 (ironically the same month as funds were paid into the bond), by cross transfer. The ombudsman praised them for their destruction of the original records (in keeping with GDPR), however I remain (to this day & by their own admission) a customer of NS&I (I had a few products with them, for most of my life). I’ve sent it to full ombudsman review, but his provisional findings are that ‘based on the evidence’ he doesn’t find any wrongdoing. The only physical evidence was provided by me. It took NS&I 6 months to come back with the ‘we cannot find any trace of the bond number you supplied’, which changed to ‘we paid it out in 1994’, when they were contacted by the ombudsman. I had over £1.4k invested and I’m told that it must be ‘disappointing, but there is nothing they can do’. I’m horrified, as that was my ‘rainy day’ fund & following the deaths of my parents last year, I relied on it, only to be dismissed. I will not let this rest, it’s my money & I want it back. It’s a sad state of affairs when a piece of legislation designed to protect customers, is used as an accepted defence by NS&I, in order to avoid accountability. 

Yorkshire_Pud

You could either cash in or reinvest at the end of each FIVE year period.
So there would have been about five five year periods where matured bonds would require a decision to be made on either cash in or reinvest?

No one wanted to carry on reinvesting as required, cashing in or increasing the gift after any five year period?

What happens/happened if the funds were just left after the five year period? No communication from ns&i? No repayment? This seems very peculiar especially as in the late 90’s there would have been paper documents rather than digital default documentation.

masonic

Yorkshire_Pud said:

What happens/happened if the funds were just left after the five year period?

One would imagine one of two things would happen. Either a closing statement and cheque were sent to the registered address of the applicant, or the proceeds were reinvested into a new account. Both options would result in the original bonds being repaid, which is consistent with what the OP has been told. The question is what happens when funds are unclaimed and communication attempts are unsuccessful? Presumably this should be treated as a lost account as per the thisismoney article's advice, since the details of the final account the proceeds were in is unknown to the holder.

If it were really a scam as stated in the thread title, then it would be much simpler to advise what to do next, as the money would be definitely gone for good.

eskbanker

masonic said:

Yorkshire_Pud said:

What happens/happened if the funds were just left after the five year period?

One would imagine one of two things would happen. Either a closing statement and cheque were sent to the registered address of the applicant, or the proceeds were reinvested into a new account. Both options would result in the original bonds being repaid, which is consistent with what the OP has been told. The question is what happens when funds are unclaimed and communication attempts are unsuccessful? Presumably this should be treated as a lost account as per the thisismoney article's advice, since the details of the final account the proceeds were in is unknown to the holder.

If it were really a scam as stated in the thread title, then it would be much simpler to advise what to do next, as the money would be definitely gone for good.

Children’s Bonds were closed to new sales from 24 September 2017, and from 26 April 2018 maturing Bonds could no longer be renewed. The last of the 5-year Children’s Bonds matured in April 2023. We contacted customers at the time to let them know their options. For any customers who haven’t been in touch, we have transferred their money to our Residual Account for safekeeping.

https://www.nsandi.com/help/manage-your-savings/maturing-investments/closed-accounts

masonic

eskbanker said:

masonic said:

Yorkshire_Pud said:

What happens/happened if the funds were just left after the five year period?

One would imagine one of two things would happen. Either a closing statement and cheque were sent to the registered address of the applicant, or the proceeds were reinvested into a new account. Both options would result in the original bonds being repaid, which is consistent with what the OP has been told. The question is what happens when funds are unclaimed and communication attempts are unsuccessful? Presumably this should be treated as a lost account as per the thisismoney article's advice, since the details of the final account the proceeds were in is unknown to the holder.

If it were really a scam as stated in the thread title, then it would be much simpler to advise what to do next, as the money would be definitely gone for good.

Children’s Bonds were closed to new sales from 24 September 2017, and from 26 April 2018 maturing Bonds could no longer be renewed. The last of the 5-year Children’s Bonds matured in April 2023. We contacted customers at the time to let them know their options. For any customers who haven’t been in touch, we have transferred their money to our Residual Account for safekeeping.

https://www.nsandi.com/help/manage-your-savings/maturing-investments/closed-accounts

Yes, I did see that, but the question is what happened from the 1990s until 2018. Presumably use of the Residual Account was because the funds could not be rolled into new bonds any longer. Customers may only know account details for the first 5 year product that was opened, and it seems NS&I hasn't been able to link that account in which the funds now reside.

ghol26

Hi, I have just come across this as I (or rather my 30 year old daughter) have received the exact same letter telling us that the bond from 1994 has been paid when it hasn't. Has anyone had any success in getting their investments back? 

RiverStone11

Wow, I’m honestly speechless.

My sister and I recently discovered that we have old children’s bonus bonds from the early 90s. It turns out our mum never cashed them in, so we both decided to contact NS&I last week. We still have the original paperwork, so there’s no issue with our information being inaccurate.

I submitted a form to update my details after speaking with a very helpful lady from their customer service team. A couple of days later, my sister did the same. (To clarify, all we’ve done so far is request to update our information.) The customer service agent informed us that once this step was complete, we could proceed to request payment of the funds.

Fast forward a week, and my sister received a letter in the post. Here’s what it said:

“Thank you for your letter. I am sorry for the delay in replying to your enquiry.

I have now completed my investigations into the above holding and from the information in our computer files can confirm that this bond(s) has been previously repaid

Like many large organisations National Savings & Investments does not retain paper documents for too many years after a transaction has been completed. Indeed our only requirement for retaining historic document is so a satisfactory audit of our accounts can take place - there is no legal requirement for retain repayment documents permanently. Therefore, we retain sufficient information in our computer records to enable the status of individual bonds to be confirmed to customers.

I am sure you will appreciate that we cannot justify the costs to the tax-payer of sorting and maintaining the substantial amount of paper these transactions have generated over the years. Furthermore, such costs are even less defensive in view of the few requests we receive for information about bonds that have been repaid many years previously.

I should point out that the existence of the original bond(s) does not mean it is valid and has not been repaid.

We have issued many millions of replacement bonds over the years and occasionally the originals come to light some time later.

In addition once we are satisfied that the registered holder of a missing bond has been correctly identified repayments are made in the absence of the actual passbook or replacements).

I realise that you may be disappointed by my reply, I am sorry I cannot be of more help.

Yours sincerely

NS&I Customer Service Team”

I received a letter today. It said:

“Thank you for getting in touch.

Our records show the account numbers ###### is not valid.

Yours sincerely

NS&I Customer Service Team”

What do we do next? Something doesn’t feel right, and I don’t trust them one bit.