If Farepak were not a good enough reason to not have anything to do with the Bank of Scotland then perhaps this blogger can relate his own tale of Bank of Scotland ineptitude.
On Friday November 10th, a party that owes me money, and who banks with the BoS, attempted to transfer to my French bank account the sum of £10,000. We shall call this party PAYER henceforth. For reasons that have something to do with stupidity by the secretary of PAYER, when the transaction was submitted the account specified was incorrect. This was noted a day or two later (actually on the Tuesday following) and the transfer was cancelled. Subsequently the money has disappeared into a black hole. We (the PAYER and myself) haev tried to get details out of the BoS about what is happening and where the money is and to date (December 21 over 5 weeks later) we have yet to have anyone actually produce any piece of paper showing where the money has gone.
We have had phonecalls. We have had verbal statements that the money was rejected and has been resubmitted blah blah blah but none of these statements has been backed up with a document that shows it to be true.
Needless to say my French bank have been mightily unimpressed - particularly as my bank account has now gone into negative territory in a significant (as in thousands of Euros) way. A week ago we got (after much hassle) a fax from BoS to my bank stating that yes they had transferred £10,000, but contrary to our requests there was no documentary proof of this fact other than a fax that could have been written by anyone. My French bank, whom I would normally list as prime suspect in this sort of affair, have actually been remarkably understanding about the whole sorry affair but, not surprisingly, after a month or so of verbal promises by me that the money is due any day now are beginning to lose patience.
This morning I emailed the following (omitting personal details) to the so-called customer relationship manager at BoS
Dear [III],
Forgive me for perhaps being a little impolite here but I have just been following up with Mme [CCC] at [BANK] and I have two things to report
Despite my request that you send [BANK] the actual documents concerning the transfer you did not do so. All you did was send the cover letter fax, this contains no details about when / whither / whence the transfer occured.
The money has not showed up in my account
I have asked, repeatedly, for some very basic information which you have not provided to either me or to [BANK]. This is to put it bluntly completely unacceptable and indicates to me a distinct lack of competence. This in turn makes me wonder whether you have in fact transfered the money at all.
To repeat.
Please give me and [BANK] the copies of the transaction slips (if electronic scrren prints or printouts, if written a photocopy of the slip) so that we can try and determine where the money is and whether somehow an error in the account details was made.
We need to know
Account the money was sent to (all details)
Date of transaction
Account the money was sent from
Any and all transaction IDs that you can locate
This should be pretty simple, unfortunately it seems to be beyond you, I do not understand why. I would appreciate it if you could call me to explain why and ideally that you call [BANK] as well.
Needless to say this missive and the accompanying verbal harangue by the PAYER got a reaction.
The reaction was not a useful one. I got this email from the PAYER a few minutes ago:
Yes I have been ringing them at hourly intervals since about noon. The investigators are supposed to have rung me.
You remember [NNN] requested that if the money for any reason could not be credited to your account by their agent bank in France they were to send it back to our account and I understand that's what's now happening - it's on its way back to our account.
I have asked the investigation team to ring me as a matter of urgency to explain what the problem was and why the money could not be credited
[SNIP]
PAYER
-----Original Message----- From: Francis Turner Sent: 21 December 2006 16:56 To: PAYER Subject: Re: Bank
What if anything have the Bank reported back?
Francis
PAYER wrote: > > Our relationship manager [III] and [NNN] who sent the fax are > > both now on Christmas Eve but the lady I have talked to say the matter > > is with the Bank's investigation team in Chester who expect to report > > back later this morning. > > > > With the agreement of my coworkers I have said that this episode is > > causing us to question the service we are getting from our bank but as > > you will gather there is nobody there worth saying that to at the > > moment. With the Allied Irish Bank who we were with if there was a > > problem on a foreign bank transfer they usually managed to come back > > to us within 36 hours so we know it can be done. > >
You will note that despite all of this the BoS have yet to actually put anything meaningful in writing. PAYER rang me a few minutes ago and confirmed that they have had no written details during the entire process. Given that it is not at at beyond the bounds of possibility that someone has made another mistake in the account details one might have thought that sending PAYER (or me) the details of the transaction and asking us to confirm them would have been obvious. Clearly it is nothing of the sort to these morons.
Despite the affair being refered to the "investigation team" they have still not given us any written feedback, and according to PAYER, the investigation team's idea of "calling back later this morning" appears to have been rather different to that commonly understood by the rest of the world, namely making a phone call before 12 noon today, as they have not yet (past 5pm GMT) made that call or provided any of the documents that were requested in the email - even though the so-called Relationship manager has buggered off on his hols, someone else did open the mail and report to PAYER that it had been sent to the "investigation team".
All I can say is suggest that everyone avoide these morons at the Bank of Scotland because they clearly don't seem able to understand English or to follow instructions.
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