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Comment by maxehmookau | Hacker News Reader

UK banks are ridiculous and they're hastening their own demise to challenger banks with attitudes likes this. My bank (Barclays) suspended my account and blocked my cards after attempting to make a large payment.

It was £2000 to the Student Loans Company. My account was a graduate account.

All of the clever machine learning anti-fraud algorithms in the world couldn't figure that one out.

Go figure.

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I have a Nationwide credit card and typically have to phone them at least once a month as Verified by Visa blocks my account.

It usually happens for companies I've made countless payments before to, last time it was Three when I tried to top up £10 on my phone.

On the other hand it allows me to go to random countries I have never visited before, and make contactless transactions without issue...

Same for me, they have way too many false positives in their fraud detection when there should be quite obvious heuristics to whitelist some payments (e.g. regular payments to the same business that have been made for years). For instance, if I pay Bitbucket the same amount every month for years, their fraud detection algorithm should never suddenly decide that this month's payment is fraudulent.

Once Nationwide decided that because they stopped two (completely ordinary, regular) payments in a row due to a false positive, that they needed to stop every payment. And because I pay most of my bills on the same day, everything was stopped.

To add to the ridiculousness, they sent me paper letters through the post, one letter per transaction. So I found out about it via a stack of envelopes coming through my door all from the same company, all, saying the same thing, all on the same day. Meanwhile, their messaging centre on their website didn't say a thing, I didn't receive any email, nor any text message. What's the point in having a messaging centre if they aren't going to send messages through it?

UK banks seem to be the worst in the world.

I studied in the UK, lots of horror stories to tell:

# Name misspelled 4 times

* Santander: They spelled my name wrong on the debit card, 4 times in a row, with a different misspelling each time. Each time I had to go to the branch and type the correct spelling into a keyboard. They still got it wrong the next time. The 5th card was correct. I was without a working card for 3 months and had to pay everything in cash.

# Locked out after they sent money to somebody else

* Barclays: My flat mate paid me sublet rent. One of the transfer didn't arrive. When he checked, the money was sent to a completely different account number he had never entered (probably an off-by-one error in their code?). He called Barclays to correct the transfer. Instead of fixing the issue, they locked his account for 2 months, he couldn't pay any rent any more, he couldn't receive money from his parents to pay for rent or university fees.

# Ridiculous branch security

* Natwest: I'm at the branch with my friend. We're sitting directly in front of the clerk with her keyboard to her Windows computer in front of her. She unlocks the screen saver, 1-finger-typing the 5-character password (so I knew the password). Then she leaves us in the room alone for 10 minutes, not even locking the screen saver again. Also, the part of the PC where the keyboard is plugged into the USB is directly next to my right leg. It would be very easy to pop in a keylogger without anybody noticing (of course it has already been done: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10322536/Barcla... and http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-santander-arrests/gang-held...). Later she asks my friend for a password. My friend looks at me, I put my fingers into my ears. Afterwards the clerk asks "why did you put your fingers into your ears?". I respond it was so I wouldn't learn my friend's password, obviously. She replies "Oh wow, that's cute!". Such is the qualification and training of those who safeguard your money.

# Preventing my card getting blocked abroad with Jedi tricks

* Santander: I'm abroad in Hungary with my UK debit card being the only one I have with me. After buying an 8£ ticket from ticket machine of the Hungarian public train transport MAV, I get an automated call from Santander to confirm whether a potentially fraudulent payment of 8£ is legit. I confirm. After a short while I receive a text that says my card is now blocked. I call Santander's support. They say my card is blocked because of a fraudulent transaction. I say I just confirmed that this transaction is not fraudulent, please unlock my card. They say "sorry, your card cannot be unlocked it has been marked with a red flag". After being stunned for a moment by this idiocy I say "so what, remove the flag then". "I can't do that Sir, we'll have to send you a new card to your UK address". I lose it with "You will not send me a new card, I am abroad and this card is the only one I can pay with here! You will unlock my card NOW!" (My inner self makes an Obi-Wan-esque hand guesture.) To my surprise, the answer is "OK, I'll check it with my boss", and shortly after "OK, card is unlocked. But we'll send you a new card in one month". I never received a new card.

I've never had any such problems with German and Swiss banks.

Santander is a Spanish banking group.

Although yes, the big banks are never a single corporation or entity stretching across the globe. In each country they operate they set up a separate business, so technically you were dealing with the Santander UK company.

Similar Experience as well. And the funny thing is, HSBC and Barclays are not that bad outside UK. It is as if all these are specific to UK only.

I have an account in a Swiss bank too. Never had any problem with it abroad (France, Spain, UK). I never hear from them and I love it. My card was stolen once and I received a call the next day, everything was reimbursed. When I call it's a human that responds. Good customer service as it should be.

It's not just the UK. An example (among many others) in France. I asked my bank (Societe Generale) to make a transfer to another bank where I also have a broker account, with the intention to make an investment. Societe Generale blocks the funds and requests a proof that I will indeed make an investment before releasing the funds. How do I prove that I am going to buy some stocks on the market when I receive the funds? It took me a week to convince them the absurdity of their request.

Barclays are intensively hiring developers for their fraud detection system at the moment - I've been approached several times but from what I can gather when I pressed them on remuneration they're looking to pay peanuts (relative to the skills required).

Why would you make a voluntary payment to SLC (assuming it was voluntary as most repayments are through PAYE)?

That is quite an unusual thing to do.

I'm self-employed and owed them the money that I would've otherwise paid through PAYE.

I paid off SLC in a lump sum after getting a bonus one year. I think it's quite normal.

There's been a lot of advice shouted about that everyone should only make the minimum payments as it'll be cheaper when the debt is eventually written off - if you earn less than £X.

That only works if the rules stay the same.

I say it's a fair gamble that they won't and that many will wish they paid them off earlier.

Then pay off the balance in full as soon as the rules change.

It's not going to be unusual with the interest rates that students on the current generation of loans are now being charged. In fact, those might well be the most expensive debts a new graduate has. The whole thing about writing off part of the loan after several decades is mostly just smoke and mirrors; many people in graduate roles won't save much if anything that way, but they'll be paying lots of extra money that looks a lot like an extra 9% of marginal income tax except that somehow it mysteriously winds up belonging to a private company these days.

I'm genuinely surprised that high street banks haven't started openly competing with the official student loans already, at least not as far as I've seen. The terms are so abusive for new students today that the banks could easily offer private student loans on significantly better terms for the students and still make a fortune themselves. Maybe they're just assuming -- not unreasonably -- that the whole student funding mess is going to blow up spectacularly within the next few years and they don't want to be caught in the blast when it happens.

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