Strange issue with credit card verification texts...

wildthing01

This is a strange situation that I've never encountered before and cannot find any useful info on tinternet. I'm hoping someone in MSE land may know what's happened, as it's worrying me slightly. Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this.

We've recently had a new credit card - I am the main cardholder, my husband is the secondary holder. We entered the correct phone number for each of us when we set up the account, and when we logged into the account at our end, it showed both numbers correctly. 

However, whenever my husband has tried to make online purchases on his card, and it wanted to send him a text message authorisation code, it wanted to send the code to a phone number that neither of us recognised and that was not visible on the account at our end. We could only see the last 3 digits of the number, but they were definitely nothing to do with us. He tried asking it to send the text anyway, and of course it never arrived, so he couldn't finish the purchases.

I logged into the account online to see if I could correct his number there - but it already showed the correct number. Not a hint of this strange number.

I have contacted the company today and they have now sorted it out and corrected the number on the account at their end (they could only see the strange number at their end). But they insisted that it must have been us who added the strange number to the account in the first place. Neither they nor their fraud department could explain where else it could have come from.

My questions are:

- Why could they see the strange number on our account at their end, but it was not showing at our end? (We could only see the correct number).
- Where could this strange number have come from? It's completely unrecognisable to us.

eskbanker

wildthing01 said:

My questions are:

- Why could they see the strange number on our account at their end, but it was not showing at our end? (We could only see the correct number).
- Where could this strange number have come from? It's completely unrecognisable to us.

Web pages made usable for customers will only permit access to certain data sources and other internal systems will be used by bank staff.  No idea how the fake number appeared though, maybe human error, but understandable (albeit not right as such) that the assumption would be that this would have been done by the customer.

Which bank is it?

wildthing01

eskbanker said:

wildthing01 said:

My questions are:

- Why could they see the strange number on our account at their end, but it was not showing at our end? (We could only see the correct number).
- Where could this strange number have come from? It's completely unrecognisable to us.

Web pages made usable for customers will only permit access to certain data sources and other internal systems will be used by bank staff.  No idea how the fake number appeared though, maybe human error, but understandable (albeit not right as such) that the assumption would be that this would have been done by the customer.

Which bank is it?

Thank you for responding. It's Barclaycard. I'm assuming then that someone had to manually enter the wrong number into the system at their end and made a mistake (entered their own number by accident maybe?)

eskbanker

wildthing01 said:

eskbanker said:

wildthing01 said:

My questions are:

- Why could they see the strange number on our account at their end, but it was not showing at our end? (We could only see the correct number).
- Where could this strange number have come from? It's completely unrecognisable to us.

Web pages made usable for customers will only permit access to certain data sources and other internal systems will be used by bank staff.  No idea how the fake number appeared though, maybe human error, but understandable (albeit not right as such) that the assumption would be that this would have been done by the customer.

Which bank is it?

Thank you for responding. It's Barclaycard. I'm assuming then that someone had to manually enter the wrong number into the system at their end and made a mistake (entered their own number by accident maybe?)

I doubt that it would literally be someone manually keying in a phone number as such, but was thinking more of some sort of minor data corruption that broke a link between account number and phone number.

Nebulous2

I had something similar - though it was a very old email address of mine which they resurrected. 

Longstanding Barclaycard customer and they've been very good. Moved my bank account to Barclays last year for the switch bonus and adding my Barclaycard to the Barclays banking app caused all sorts of problems, needing a branch visit to unlock it and merge the two profiles. 

I had a previous email address which I lost when my ISP shut it down. Somehow, although the app was showing my correct one, the people in branch were insistent that the correct email address was the old one, which hasn't been used for about 8 years. 

They were unable to say why it had reappeared on their systems after such a big gap, and I wasn't convinced they actually believed me. 

However we resolved it - I've moved on, helped by the switch bonus which made the branch visit and production of documents worth it.