Learn the moral of this banking horror story

published 30 October 2014

A few weeks ago a friend told me a banking horror story. She runs a small charity and inadvertently transferred £10,000 to the wrong account (having confused a reference number with an account number).

She called her bank, Barclays. They followed their "set procedures". This involved sending one email to the recipient bank, waiting three days, sending another and then giving up. They would do no more.

My friend is hardly the first to have input the wrong details. Unfortunately, she is also not the first to have had trouble getting her money back. David Baldwin had a similar experience, says Ali Hussain in The Sunday Times.

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He transposed two digits when entering his wife's account details into the Barclays system. The result? Three months later he noticed that his regular payments weren't arriving in her account. They'd gone to someone else at Santander.

Neither Barclays nor Santander would help get the money back, or even disclose the identity of the recipient (it's against the Data Protection Act, apparently). However, Baldwin had another card to play. It is illegal to "knowingly spend money in your account that was not intended for you".

If you are not aware of the money and don't spend it, no crime is committed. If you are and you do, it is. So he called the police, who located and visited the recipient of the cash. "He admitted receiving money that was not his and he agreed to refund it."

So, what do you do if something like this happens to you? First, make an effort to make sure it doesn't. UK banks don't check the name of the recipient when making transfers they rely on the sort code and account number alone so check and double check before you confirm any payments. If it's too late for that, contact your bank and ask them to help you retrieve your money.

The bank may as Barclays did write a lacklustre letter or email to the recipient (under a voluntary code introduced in April it has to take action of some kind within two days), but some will also ask the recipient bank to freeze the funds while the matter is sorted out, says Kate Palmer inThe Daily Telegraph. If that doesn't work, you might remind the bank that you can refer the matter to the police, and if you need to do so, take it to court.

And my friend? She took a different route. She Googled the sort code of the bank, called them and spoke to a nice man who located the cash in a holding account and arranged for it to be returned to the charity. It took 45 minutes for her to sort out by herself, but I think we can safely assume it's going to have a rather more long-term effect on her relationship

with Barclays.

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.