Premium Bond Nightmare Website!

peterhjohnson

Just been helping a relative who started off wanting to withdraw some money from his Premium Bond account and ended up tearing out most of his hair.  Older readers will be familiar with stories about the incompetence of the "Gas Board" but NS&I have definitely taken over the torch!

It started off quite well. The site accepted his account number, surname and password and made an automated call to him and accepted the code. Then just to be sure, it sent him an automated text with a different code to put into their website. Showed him his balance and ... logged him out  claiming he'd used the back button. He had done no such thing. He tried again, same nonsense. Tried yet again on his smartphone - same thing.

So I got involved, made him do the whole thing again, just to be sure, and still no joy. Being a little more Internet-savvy, I googled the error message and it turns out it's a long-standing bug. They blame people for using an unstable connection. He wasn't amused about that, every other site he uses works fine. After some trial and error, we turned his WiFi off and got more sense using the EE connection on his mobile.

By this time, he was so disenchanted with NS&I, he decided he'd take ALL his money out and close his account completely. At which point, NS&I demanded to know his grandmother's name, and disagreed with his answer. Now, I also knew the name of the lady, and I know NS&I were wrong.

We then spent some time with an online form that claimed to be able to do the job but it decided that his date of birth was invalid. You might think that we tried the wrong format but it had the usual calendar thing, so no.

Finally, we hit on the idea of withdrawing £1 less than his actual balance. No granny question, and we got a confirmation message, so we'll see!

Hoenir

Never had an issue with NSI online. More than happy to stay invested. 

masonic

The website is a monstrosity, but regarding the security questions and answers, these are chosen when the account is set up and the answers chosen do not need to be factually correct. If a fictitious granny is invented, then that is what needs to be remembered and provided. Likewise if the original answer contained a typo.

Section62

peterhjohnson said:

By this time, he was so disenchanted with NS&I, he decided he'd take ALL his money out and close his account completely. At which point, NS&I demanded to know his grandmother's name, and disagreed with his answer. Now, I also knew the name of the lady, and I know NS&I were wrong.

NS&I only know what your relative told them to start with - they don't do their own research.  He has either given them a different name or word, or made a typo when entering it originally.  There is an option to reset the security questions, but it involves waiting for a code to be sent in the post.

peterhjohnson said:

Finally, we hit on the idea of withdrawing £1 less than his actual balance. No granny question, and we got a confirmation message, so we'll see!

I had a similar thing myself recently, and found the same solution worked.  For some reason NS&I have a higher level of security for closing an account than they do for withdrawing all but £1. No idea why.

Paulrn

Just cashed in mine took 5 mins, perfectly good website with good security.

p00hsticks

@peterhjohnson I suggest that you amend your thread title to keep within forum rules (also, if you are using your real name as your user name I suggest you ask the forum team to change it for security reasons as you are making yourself more vulnerable to scams etc by posting under your real name.

From
The MSE Forum Guide: Frequently Asked Questions & Rules (moneysavingexpert.com)

Active boycotting

We appreciate emotions can run high should you experience poor service from companies, but we cannot accept active calls to boycott organisations as we are unable to verify the service you received.

Bravepants

I have Premium Bonds simply for the little extra surprise each month (or not) that gets paid into my "Pocket Money" bank account. Never had any issues with the site. It's important that security information is written down safely somewhere with all of these online accounts. Rightly or wrongly I keep such data in an Excel spreadsheet.

fabsaver

I've also had the issue of being repeatedly logged out, claiming I've used the back button when I certainly haven't. It started when I began using 3 mobile for my internet connection and it seems there is something that is incompatible with the NS&I website. I don't experience problems with any other websites using that same connection.

I've tried all kinds of things to fix the problem over the past year. The only thing that has worked for me is getting another SIM from a different mobile service provider and switching to using that whenever I want to log in to my NS&I account.

I'm not sure what the problem is but I really wish they would fix it. If you are affected it makes it completely impossible to do anything at all without being logged out repeatedly. 

peterhjohnson

p00hsticks said:

@peterhjohnson I suggest that you amend your thread title to keep within forum rules (also, if you are using your real name as your user name I suggest you ask the forum team to change it for security reasons as you are making yourself more vulnerable to scams etc by posting under your real name.

From
The MSE Forum Guide: Frequently Asked Questions & Rules (moneysavingexpert.com)

Active boycotting

We appreciate emotions can run high should you experience poor service from companies, but we cannot accept active calls to boycott organisations as we are unable to verify the service you received.

It's not my real name

Olinda99

fabsaver said:

I've also had the issue of being repeatedly logged out, claiming I've used the back button when I certainly haven't. It started when I began using 3 mobile for my internet connection and it seems there is something that is incompatible with the NS&I website. I don't experience problems with any other websites using that same connection.

I've tried all kinds of things to fix the problem over the past year. The only thing that has worked for me is getting another SIM from a different mobile service provider and switching to using that whenever I want to log in to my NS&I account.

I'm not sure what the problem is but I really wish they would fix it. If you are affected it makes it completely impossible to do anything at all without being logged out repeatedly. 

yes it is definitely true if you use mobile phone as a hotspot (or indeed just use a mobile phone browser) to access NS and I  then you keep getting locked out because of the back button 

I think Three is particularly bad but it does happen on other mobile networks as well 

I was once told the problem is because on the mobile network you keep changing connections to maintain the best signal and NS and I read this as a back button but I have no idea if this is true 

there is no work around the only way is to access NSI via a 'real' broadband connection if I can use that word

Ectophile

The web site doesn't work in an ordinary web site on a PC either.  It always takes me two attempts to log in.

The first time, I go through the whole two factor authentication thing, then it instantly logs me out again.

Only on the second time, usually using a different authentication method, does it actually work.