OFT taking banks to court over unfair charges
Posted by Alex on Thu 26th July 2007
No sh*t Sherlock: BBC reports bank charges ‘crippling the vulnerable’
The BBC has run a 'Let's state the obvious' story today, as the National Consumer Council says the hidden costs of “free banking” should be investigated.
Obviously, though, it can only be a good thing that these issues are being highlighted - students are among the most vulnerable group of people who can be hit with repeated charges, and their limited income, usually in Student Loan chunks, means banks can expect to be able to hit students with numerous charges as students' loan money runs out, safe in the knowledge that further loan payments will be coming soon to cover these amounts.
In my second year at Uni, my account ran almost
Posted by Alex on Sat 30th June 2007
You’re threatening legal action over *how much*, exactly…?
I've just arrived home to find this little paper package of joy on my mat (click to enlarge):
… That's right kids - BT Mobile are threatening to send in the debt collectors, issue a Default notice, and incur the wrath of the gods on me, for a debt of (drum roll please):
1 penny.
Oh yes, it's three for the price of one (penny) on this BT Special Offer: for all you attention-starved, loveless people out there, you can have the attention of BT's Bad Debts department, a swarm of bailiffs, and even - for the lucky few among you - the loving attention of a Magistrate. Ho hum.
… Of course, the biggest irony here is the cheque I also received in the post from BT today - for the same account - as partial refund of the
Posted by Alex on Wed 16th May 2007
Bankwatch: bad news for claimaints as Lloyds TSB wins charge reclaim case
This isn't so good: it looks like the first significant resistance against the growing anti-bank charges movement has been encountered in the form of District Judge Cook, reports the BBC. A customer of Lloyds TSB, Kevin Berwick, was claiming
Posted by Alex on Tue 15th May 2007
Bankwatch: RBS introduce
More evidence of the banks' cash-grabbing antics emerged today in a report by the Evening Standard, as they report that the Royal Bank of Scotland group (which includes Mint and Lloyds TSB) are introducing a
Posted by Alex on Mon 30th April 2007
Bankwatch: Judge attacks “timewasting” Lloyds TSB
Following the latest on bank charges is becoming a tiny bit of a hobby for me now as - in common with millions of other customers - my bank takes more and more of my money in penalty charges to cover their “costs”.
If you've read much of my blog, you might have spotted that a lot of my charges come from one charge taking me over my overdraft limit, with more charges piled on top to add insult to injury. Again, this is a common problem for lots of bank customers.
In the news today, I spotted this story about Lloyds TSB being accused by a judge of timewasting behaviour - not the first time such tactics have been used by the banks according to the BBC's article - and another story involving my personal favourite bank, the Alliance & Leicester (not that I ever write about their poor service or anything… ahem) tacitly admitting their charges should only be around the
Posted by Alex on Fri 27th April 2007
Bank charges scam-watch: Natwest pays out
In the latest of the virtually unbroken series of embarrassing defeats for banks being pursued through the courts by customers sick of being hit with penalty charges - decreed as “unlawful” by OFCOM - Natwest bank has repaid
Posted by Alex on Tue 17th April 2007
More proof that more money doesn’t equal more quality
I've written - no, ranted - before about how embarrassingly poor the Alliance and Leicester website is, when their badly-designed personal banking website managed to cost me a lot of money in penalty charges.
Checking my balance tonight (ok, I'm waiting for my student loan to come in so I can pay off some debts and, err, maybe spend some of it on a posh widescreen telly. Maybe…) I noticed an advert-style link at the bottom of the banking website. Apart from anything else, this position is one of the worst places to tuck important information as advert blindness tends to set in for anything placed in this part of a web page.
I'm a cynical git by nature - when I'm not off upsetting people, being embarrasingly drunk, or just being plain embarrassing - and decided to see what wonderous information the A&L were going to provide its customers that one can't already find out by reading any number of existing - and respected - websites (for example here, here, here, here … etc).
The first thing to annoy me when I clicked the link was that it opened a new window. Not a major issue for most people, maybe, but I consider it bad manners to start popping up new windows on your visitors' computers unless you have a very good reason to do so.
The second annoyance - and this is the point where I decided I had to write a ranty blog entry about this - was the completely gratuitous 2-step entry process - first I was shown a picture of a safe, with some text fading in and finally a “[click here to] enter” link appearing in the middle of the safe's combination dial thingy:
… followed by an equally gratuitous animation of the safe opening:
… and after a few seconds, you're presented with this completely Flash-based website:
Very pretty, lovely… Just one question - why has someone gone to all the trouble to pay - probably a lot of money - to have a Flash website developed to do this, when a plain, boring - but just as pretty - HTML website would have done *exactly* the same job, been a lot cheaper to develop and bug-test, loaded faster, provided a much higher level of accessibility and user friendliness, and would (eventually) have found it's way into the Google indexes??
However, I ought to balance this argument out a little - the information in the site isn't completely crap, although it's extremely basic and does little to help people make use of the myriad free anti-virus and anti-spyware tools available on the net. Oh, and there's also a link to the security centre on the A&L online banking log-in page:
The only problem? Clicking on the link in Safari does nothing - the HTML is all there, but it won't do nowt. The mouse cursor doesn't even change when you hover over the link. That might have something to do with the fact even this little web page has more than 30 code errors, according to the W3C validation service:
Good going, A&L ;o)
The thing that really disappoints me about all this is that, while paying undoubtedly huge sums of money to their web developers to do work which looks like the production work of a ten year old learning how to use Flash, A&L's customer service still leaves a lot to be desired - my heart goes out to anyone who has to enjoy the less-than-pleasurable experience of dealing with their Leeds-based call centre if you're trying to get a charge refunded, or cancel a direct debit.
… And, no, I'm not just pissed off because they took
Posted by Alex on Wed 11th April 2007
Illegal bank charges - the BBC helps consumers start to bite back
(Off-topic. Again. Wonder when I'll ever do some work…? ;o) )
Posted by Alex on Wed 13th December 2006
Ever had a penalty charge from the bank?
(Off topic fun. Isn't it always these days?)
I've just been reminded by a friend that you can apply to reclaim any bank charges you've had in the last 6 years. For example, a direct debit for
Posted by Alex on Wed 22nd November 2006