2012-02-10

Bloody Barclays

Once again they cause havoc with their "fraud department". Drives me around the bend.

This time, having transfered a reasonably large sum, £X, in to the account using on-line banking, we try to spend £X using a chip'n'pin card, only to be "referred". This means the merchant calling up, and it took about half an hour in the end. Eventually they talk to us on the call and check a couple of Direct Debit payment and the code on the back of the card, and authorise it.

But what a waste of bloody time.

(a) If it was fraud the fraudster had access to on-line banking to do the transfer then he has the details of Direct Debits and other transactions, so a pointless question to ask about Direct Debits we have.

(b) The card chip was used, so the real card, so checking the code on the back is pointless, its not a copy.

What is worse, apparently, having authorised the payment by talking to us and confirming we were who we said we were, they block the card as a fraud prevention measure. WTF?

Anyway, Sandra went in and gave the manager of the local branch a bollocking, and rightly so. Not amused.

2 comments:

  1. We had a great one this week. We were ordering a bunch of software upgrades on the company credit card. The next day someone calls up claiming to be from HSBC, asking for the wrong name, and giving an invalid callback number (we *never* give details to someone who calls in - company policy - no matter how convincing) - and our account manager when contacted confirmed that it was a fraudulent call.

    Turns out it *was* the fraud dept., and they're (a) too inept to even work out who they're calling, and (b) don't know their own phone number. This caused some mess with stopped transactions.

    I've seen this before on my home accounts with Halifax.. you'd get this wierd call then when you tried to contact them to find out what was wrong they'd be clueless and tell you it must have been a fraudulent call. There appears to be no internal communication at banks at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Normally the card services side of the bank is entirely different to the day to day banking part. I overheard a visitor to my old bank being told to go away and call card services as they couldn't answer a simple query about the card at the counter!

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