Recent experiences withdrawing a few thousand in cash

jaypers

hallmark said:

jaypers said:

So many horrible crimes in society that are transacted by cash and never anything electronic.

Never anything electronic? There are many horrible electronic crimes.  Defrauding people out of their savings, Ransomware with demands for payment in Crypto, or blackmail whereby some dupe is misled into unwise behaviour thinking they're talking to somebody they're not for starters.

Bad choice of words on my part, apologies. Obviously most scams are electronic but effectively the actual transactions intention at source is meant to be legitimate (if that makes sense). What I was getting at is that it’s a lot harder to move money electronically for illegitimate purposes as there is always a paper trail. With cash there isn’t. 

castle96

Santander £20k in £5s 1 days notice. no probs

kaMelo

Go on I'll bite. Why five pound notes rather than tens or twenties?

castle96

FOR SON. cOS IT LOOKED MORE 'IMPRESSIVE'.

hallmark

Went down the cashpoint path in the end as suggested by several people. All very easy, tbh I'm amazed that an in-person withdrawal with ID might mean a 30-minute interview whereas half a dozen £500 withdrawals six days in a row from somebody who probs hadn't withdrawn cash for years passed completely without comment (I was kinda expecting my card would be frozen). Have to say a few thousand in modern notes isn't nearly as satisfying as the old stuff, you can't even fold it into a decent wad, it slips all over the place & returns to it's original shape despite all attempts to force it otherwise....

pjs493

I’ve not made large cash withdrawals from a branch recently, but had a few large online transactions stopped by NatWest and a call from fraud prevention. It was really all down to unusual activity. 

My husband died last year and I had to make a number of irregular larger than usual payments to do things such as pay off a credit card balance of a few hundred pounds, all the way up to paying the balance of a mortgage of around £45k.

When I first tried to pay the credit card bill over the phone with my late husband’s provider, I got a text alert from NatWest flagging the transaction and stopping it. I apologised to the credit card company, ended the call, then called NatWest using the number on the back of my debit card. 

I got asked all the expected questions, such as: why was I making a payment to someone else’s credit card? Had someone I didn’t know or trust ask me to make the payment? Did I trust the number I’d called? Etc etc. When I explained the situation and circumstances, the fraud team happily approved the transaction and I called the credit card company back to make the payment. 

The same thing happened when I tried to pay the balance off the mortgage via online banking. The fraud team asked me lots and lots of questions, all of which were reasonable. After all, they were just trying to protect my money. My husband and I both banked with NatWest but I still got several transactions flagged to the fraud team. I’d rather have had those calls and questions than suddenly find I’d lost a bunch of money because I’d fallen for some con or had been duped in some way.

Conversely, I also recently bought a new car as a cash purchase from a reputable main dealer. I paid the deposit on my credit card in person, and a couple of days before I was due to collect the car, the dealership provided me with bank details to pay the balance to speed up the collection process. 

When making the transfer via online banking again, it was flagged and I spoke to the fraud team. I got asked a lot of questions again and they recommended that I call the dealership and ask if I could pay by debit card instead because it provided me with more insurance if something went wrong with the car. The dealership was happy to take a card payment and stated that they often found it easier for customers to pay by bank transfer to avoid sitting in the showroom on the phone to their bank’s fraud team for ages as large transactions often got flagged.

I called NatWest back, explained the dealership were happy for me to pay by card, and they put a note on my account to expect a large transaction from the car dealership on the day I was due to collect the car. They said it could still get flagged by the automated system, but the note would mean it could be manually overridden. If I tried to make a large transaction elsewhere that day, it would be flagged and held. 

All that was to say, I think NatWest take fraud prevention very seriously and as such they want to ensure customers, and their money, are protected. In the background I’m sure they were cross checking information too. When I was paying off the mortgage, for example, they would have been able to see I’d been making payments towards the mortgage since my husband died and would have been able to tell they were genuine details for the mortgage provider in question. They would have also been able to see documents I’d sent to NatWest following my husband’s death, the change of our joint account becoming a sole account, etc. They would have been able to see I’d sent a copy of the Grant of Probate to NatWest and that timeline would have fit with my having sent the same document to the mortgage company and paying the balance. 

pjs493

In addition to what I posted above. I’ve just recalled a couple of decades ago when I used to pay my tips from a job as a tour guide into my building society account on a regular basis (a couple of times per week), and quickly got to know the people working in the branch enough that they recognised me when I walked in. At one point I may have mentioned during small talk that I was saving up to study overseas. When the time came to withdraw the cash to change into foreign currency, I was able to withdraw £5,000 without any questions being asked. 

I recall being surprised at the time that they didn’t ask me what the money was for, but perhaps it was because they saw me regularly depositing money, could tell/knew I was a student saving up for something, and given that it was in the days of having a passbook for the account, there wasn’t a way for me to withdraw the money using a card or a bank transfer. I suppose they could have insisted on a cashiers cheque if they wanted to. If they had asked I would have explained I was withdrawing the money to go a few doors down to M&S to exchange it for some currency/traveller cheques. 

A few years ago my husband and I bought a second half car from a private seller. We sat in the car with the seller and did an online banking transfer into his account, I vaguely remember my husband getting a call from the bank to check all was ok. When the seller was content that the funds had reached his account, he handed over the piece of the V5C we needed, got out of the car, and went into his house. My husband drove off in our other car and I drove off in the one we use bought. 

Had the transaction happened a few years earlier, we’d have likely been required to take cash out of the bank. At the time we bought the car, the place where we lived didn’t have any banks so we would have had to make several trips to a cash machine, or booked in the withdrawal for collection from the mobile branch van that visited once a week. Potentially we could have arranged for the withdrawal from a Post Office counter, but again I presume this would have had to be booked in advance due the figure in question in case it cleared out the Post Office. 

penners324

Had my neighbours mother have her handbag stolen, within 10 minutes they'd withdrawn £5000 over a counter in Barclays..... sounds like Barclays didn't ask enough questions 

flaneurs_lobster

penners324 said:

Had my neighbours mother have her handbag stolen, within 10 minutes they'd withdrawn £5000 over a counter in Barclays..... sounds like Barclays didn't ask enough questions 

How did that happen? Having trouble seeing how anyone can walk into a bank branch with someone else's card (even if other id has also been stolen) and withdraw anything, let alone £5K.

mebu60

penners324 said:

Had my neighbours mother have her handbag stolen, within 10 minutes they'd withdrawn £5000 over a counter in Barclays..... sounds like Barclays didn't ask enough questions 

How exactly? Was the PIN recorded somewhere?