SHOCKED - broker executed trades, but missed bookings in cash statement

caldi9 wrote: »

Not booking 3 items totalling a material amount is not an error.

Correctly booking 3 items totalling a material amount is not an error.

Not booking 3 items totalling a material amount, is an error.

What you mean is, you suspect the error was made on purpose rather than being accidental. In other words they deliberately didn't book the dividends or sales proceeds, and intend to keep those amounts for themselves rather than applying them to your account.

This should not happen at all and I should not be the one finding it out myself.

Correct, it shouldn't happen as the generation of the contract note and dividend voucher should, in an ideal world, feed into the account postings or vice versa. But here they appear to be independent processes and only one part of the process has occurred. The other leg needs fixing.

Still, if you're going to claim that fraud has occurred you would need to be clear that the money has been lost. Rather than the money still being in the account, but failing to show on the transaction history report and available balance.

It is one of the larger providers and I would like to know how many people get cheated like this.

"cheated" is quite strong language when you haven't determined whether they maliciously took your money, nor that if you closed your account, the money wouldn't be received. You might be right that the money isn't on the account so wouldn't be received if you closed the account, but that still doesn't mean they deliberately sought to deprive you of it.

Perhaps one of the processes wasn't run because the person who was supposed to run it was affected by a hangover picked up on the bank holiday long weekend and not thinking clearly. Or was stressed on a Friday afternoon being about to leave for a package holiday with the kids and hadn't packed yet. So failure to book the transaction was a lack of competence rather than an act of malice.

It is fraud, nothing else.

That's your conclusion having considered all the possible options that your imagination could come up with, and eliminating them all until fraud was the only one left. Perhaps that is a lack of imagination on your part .

Instead of, "It is fraud, nothing else", it's rather more correct to say "It is fraud, or something else".

Should I take a lawyer?

Only if they refuse to credit the proceeds after you query it, which would be incredibly unbelievable. So you will have the money "back" at no cost to yourself and a lawyer would only create cost to yourself.

Could I get something out of this?

Once you have highlighted the issue and they have fixed the error in your report, there will be no financial loss, so it depends what 'something' you are looking to obtain. If you tell them that your discovering over the weekend that some funds had not been credited was something that gave you significant worry, heartache and mental anguish, and caused you to waste 40 minutes of your Saturday night on an investment forum soliciting opinions on how to deal with a potential fraud by a service provider, they may send you £25-50 by way of apology.

If the correction of your account and strength of the apology is not satisfactory, you can take it to the financial ombudsman service "after* exhausting their complaints process. The ombudsman won't consider your complaint until the complaints process of the broker has been used and has come to an end (or after 8 weeks, whichever is earlier).

When the ombudsman considers your complaint and sees that the problem has now been fixed, they will suggest a solution which will put you back in the same financial position as if the mistake hadn't been made in the first place, which will result in you getting a further £0 if you are already in the correct position. Perhaps it will result in something if the provider makes a mistake in backdating any interest they owe on the cash that should have been sitting idle in your account. However, the interest rate on such accounts is typically zero percent or something very nominal, so it's unlikely there is much scope for the broker to miscalculate by a material amount.

Notifying the FCA will achieve nothing because they don't deal with the public's complaints about service providers. Instead they will refer you to the broker's own complaints process, telling you to follow it up with FOS if you're not satisfied at the end of that process.

If you do end up contacting the FOS for a ruling because the complaints process at the broker doesn't result in your problem being fixed, it will cost the broker circa £500 (paid to the FOS rather than to you) as a charge to help fund the FOS's operations based on number of complaints investigated. It will also cost the broker some time, corresponding with the FOS to confirm that they did indeed correct your account and ensured you weren't out of pocket.

As the broker will want to make sure they hit their profit targets (making same amount of profits they would have done if they didn't have the expense of dealing with the FOS), they will likely pass on the expense of such time and fees to their customers through increased fees in future years. So you may decide the knee-jerk reaction of getting the FOS involved is not warranted, if your complaint is adequately dealt with.

It's unlikely you will need to contact the FOS. Once you lodge a formal complaint with the broker, the broker will get it fixed. If there was indeed a real fraud (ie rather than being a processing mistake, some member of staff has been syphoning off cash transactions from customer accounts to their own account to build a pot of money to fund a permanent vacation to South America), the broker will be grateful for you raising the complaint, though they are unlikely to tell you that's what occurred.