Be Excellent To Each Other

Would you miss £1,000 a month? This lady didn't. She set up an internet banking whatnot to pay her £1,000 salary from her business account and got the number wrong. The recipient has allegedly withdrawn the money each month and dunnabunk. I am all sorts of suspicious over this, as it rings less true than "We own a dog but it was totally a fox that ate our babie's face then dunnabunk".

There are lies around somewhere, I suspect this will come back and bite "Sally" if it is true. No chance a joint income of £50000 would not miss £1000 a month, that's a third of their take home wage.
If this is as stated, I suspect their actual cash take home on their businesses must be a tad more than £50000 and HMRC might be interested...

Fuck off, Sally.

Don't disagree but what about the point that if the name is wrong on the receiving account, perhaps banks should have a notification feedback on that... So as to contact the payer and ask them to double check their details.

Would have saved this woman all but a grand, at worst.

Sort code and account number are easily fucked up. It's possible to do this mass market with a little goodwill. The option to reciew submitted details on initial payment setup is rarely given attention, ots not in human nature to so when given the chance. Source: me working in bank transfers for ages a decade ago and seeing how far things have come.

I felt like an absolute idiot when I realised I had been doing something similar for TEN pounds a month.

Though I got the money back as it was going to some PPI crap I had never signed up for. I thought missing the ten quid a month was an egregious error. A grand? Smells fishy.

What a bizarre conclusion. Internet banking is great. Surely the conclusion is "check your bank account on a regular basis"?

I could understand it more if it were going into some long term savings account you didn't pay attention to, but a current account? Surely you'd check the first one to ensure it ended up in the right place?


Although a way of moving money about without having to copy a 6 and an 8 digit number would probably be better.

Yeah - I've never had it go wrong, but I always think just how easy it would be for a digit to be misread. Especially when paying in cheques.

I paid for 2 TV licences for about 4 years....

I also find it hard to believe someone wouldn't miss a grand a month, but by the same token it's just wonderful to hear that British online banks don't care about the account name and only the sort code/account number. This isn't always the case overseas and strikes me as a massive oversight regarding error prevention.

I really thought account numbers would have extra "checksum" digits or something, so that if you mistype the account number you'd be most likely to get an error.

Malc

I don't know about anyone else but I check my bank account daily. How on earth was this missed?

I'd need anti-depressants if I was going to start checking mine daily.

I assumed checksum or similar too - but my guess is that given the 100m possible combinations for account number, and 1m combinations for sort code, the odds of matching a valid account number with the matching bank branch in error are astronomically high, thus negating that need.

Indeed APOD, I used to work in a bank and people got account numbers wrong all the time. You were extremely unlucky if you managed to get a correct combination and have your money turn up in someone elses account. Most of the time, you'd have incorrect numbers so the transfer just wouldn't take place.

I do check mine almost daily, but luckily I am already on anti-depressants.

Need stronger ones now, mind.

I used to check daily, but now I have so much money, that I never run out* so stopped worrying about it;.


* May not be true

I check mine regularly to see if the mysterious £1,000 monthly deposits are still coming in.

I typically check mine when it stops letting me buy things, in order to work out what went wrong.

I do this, too.

In all seriousness, I used to do spreadsheets that tracked my expenditure on everything for a few years, until I got bored of it.
Turns out, if I watch my expenditure like a hawk, or if I completely ignore it, I pretty much always spend the amount that I earn.

In some cases I find it actually makes things worse. If I'm checking my account all the time then I know if I can easily afford something, if I'm not sure I might hesitate or not bother at all with whatever useless bauble has tickled my fancy that week.

Heh! This sounds eerily familiar. Only without the spreadsheets. What do you think I am? A nerd?