Forged cheque nightmare - HSBC making me pay £10,500

This past year has been literal hell on Earth. It has been a painful nightmare that I would never wish on my worst enemy. I am a 21 year old university student and October last year the unimaginable happened. I had been called into my former bank HSBC after they said they had frozen it due to unusual activity. When I went they presented me with a cheque of £9566 that had been paid in my name into my account, with my signature forged!! I couldn’t believe it and I was so confused, I thought I had been dreaming!! The money from the cheque had then been transferred to two accounts I have never heard of and supposedly withdrawn by the receipients!

The bank said they would carry out an investigation and I was confident that they would find and punish the !!!!!!!s who did all this and let me use my account a few weeks after the investigation had finished. I had received a call a few weeks prior with someone posing to be HSBC staff, saying that they are updating the system and need to confirm my security details for my internet banking, that if I did not confirm my details my account would get wiped off the system and I would no longer be able to access it online. They were so believable, and I was very naive but fell for it!! I believed it to really be HSBC and never thought that it could be fraudsters.

To my utter shock the bank sent me a letter in January saying they had closed my account and demanded that I pay them over £10,566!!! (£1000 of it being my student overdraft). From then on I spent a lot of money that should have been used on food on transport to and from the bank on multiple occasions to sort it out! I kept receiving frequent threatening letters and calls from the bank’s collection department demanding that I pay the amount of £10,566! The bank insisted that I was the one who paid in the cheque myself! I filed a complaint, and they responded that I signed the cheque myself and that because the secure key was used they believed I authorised the online transfer transactions myself. I filed a report with Action Fraud (police) who recently got back to me saying there is not enough evidence.

To make matters worse, I am completely sure that an ex partner was involved! As I type this I cannot fathom that I could have been so stupid and idiotic! I was dating a guy at the time who was very cunning, he made sure that he would have access to my phone by accusing me of cheating, and he would become very frightening if I did not comply! He also would say that he did not have credit on his phone, so would use mine to make calls or send messages. Being that we were dating he had access to my room also. Not long after this whole cheque fraud happened, he dumped me via phone and I could not access him again. I searched for him on Facebook, various social medias - nothing! His phone number goes straight to voicemail, when I rang on no caller ID it did the same which means he has changed his phone. I could never get hold of him again and he completely disappeared. Similarly, I have not been able to get a hold of his friend either to find out where my ex is and how to contact him. I know I was desperate and very brainless, I regret getting involved with him every single day but never thought he would trick me to the extremes that I would fall victim to identity theft and be left in debt of thousands of pounds from fraud. This has broken me to think that people could be so evil, after the lovely way I treated him!

I have since contacted the Financial Ombudsman but I do not have much confidence in them after reading a string of hundreds of terrible reviews, all along the line of them often unfairly favouring with the banks particularly as they are funded by them.

For the time being I opened an account with Monzo (a mobile app) and use this to take in money from my parents and elsewhere and for day to day use. I have spent almost every night since crying myself to sleep, I have been stressed beyond belief and my depression has worsened dramatically - I missed some lectures because of it though somehow managed to pass my exams through all of this. I barely sleep, I barely eat. I am panicking all the time and worried sick constantly. I’ve had extreme thoughts of ending things. I can’t explain to you how torturous this past year has been. This is the only thing that is ever on my mind and the £10,566 debt weighing over my head as a young girl in her early 20s at uni has made me actually throw up with nausea. I have not been able to enjoy myself and my friends have noted how I’ve become such a different person. Every minute is suffering. Does anyone else know what I can do, if FOS don’t help me out? Are there any other measures that I can take now? Do you have any advice at all? Thank you sincerely.