Thread: A&L - Ombudsman is backing THEM up!

What is it with the A&L? They try and portray this "we're so friendly" public image, yet as soon as you contact them with a legitimate complaint, their rottweiler call centre staff treat you like something smelly they've stepped in!

I hold two identical current accounts with A&L. One is used for day to day banking and the other is used for group holiday trips I arrange. Early last year I went online to refund some money out of account A to a person who had been on a group holiday with me. I needed to transfer about £400 and only had £310 in there, so I arranged the transfer from that account and in the same session, transferred £100 to account A from my A&L account B, also in my online banking area.

Guess what? Oh yeah... A&L managed to take out the £400 overnight that night, but didn't apply the credit in from the other account I hold with them (same account name, same branch, same type, cleared funds, electronic transfer) until some time the next day. Of course they hit me with a charge (without telling me at this point) of £25, thus taking the account, which should have been £10 in credit by this point, overdrawn by £15. They then, a couple of days later, charged me another £25 for going overdrawn again and wrote to me.

"You're having a laugh," I thought and called them up, good naturedly, telling them that it looked like they'd made a simple mistake and surely they could see this was daft as I'd transferred money over to cover the transfer out, etc... Well, you'd have thought I'd rung up and threatened to roger the woman with a frozen ferret, the way she reacted. Straight up on her high horse, telling me I should read the t's and c's, etc... Yeah, yeah, I said, but surely as customer service, you can see that in this case it's daft, the money was there, it was coming in from your other account, etc...

Anyway, she wouldn't shift, she ended up putting the phone down on me and I had to call back to get her name so I could complain. I wrote in, telling them there appeared to be a mistake and that I disputed the charges and this was silly and please could they stop it before it all got out of hand and so on.

got back the form letter about bank charges, had to write again, by which time another £25 went on, complained about that, saying that I was disputing the debt and would they please stop adding charge after charge on whilst I was disputing it.

got back another form letter a week or so later, and a letter telling me another charge had been applied. I then contacted the fos to complain that the A&L were totally ignoring me and they said that as it wasn't a standard bank charge case, they'd look at it, but they were a bit busy.

A&L continued to add charges, I continued to write to them telling them the FOS were looking into it and could they please pack it in, they continued to write, etc... By December, they had got up to £397 of charges... awesome, huh? At this point they simply froze the account. At least no more charges.

anyhow, it took until this flipping August for the FOS to actually look at the complaint. what did they do? They said that A&L were perfectly right to do what they did as, buried in the t's anc c's it mentioned that it took up to a day for even internal transfers between accounts to be credited.... would you believe it...

I wrote back explaining that the FOS were basically a joke if that was their best response and that, regardless of anythign else, surely as soon as I started disputing the charge with the A&L they should have frozen the action.

The FOS managed to completely ignore that question when they replied but said they had "good news" as the A&L as a good will gesture were prepared to knock £100 off the £397... well, as you can imagine, I told them to stick their offer where the sun doesn't shine, as creating a £397 debt when being told that the initial charge was in dispute, is hardly best practise for a bank now, is it?

I wrote back AGAIN to the FOS pointing out the OFT guidelines. The Ombudsman just emailed saying they wanted me to call to discuss. I told them to bog off as I wanted a written record, even if via email, of all their opinions on this.

Apparently the FOS don't have the power to tell a bank to improve it's level of service - I have that in black and white from the FOS... amazing. They aren't regulators and they don't have the power to award punitive damages. The OS say that basically they cannot see that the bank breached any duty it owed to me and therefore they cannot uphold my complaint...

Just in case anyone is online who knows the facts here, am I being mad, or is it really wrong that the A&L should be able to do what they did to me here?

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It's currently with an adjudicator. It's gone backwards and forwards a few times now, he's now gone off to consider their actions in light of the OFT guidelines for debt collection. I maintain that what the A&L were doing from the first charge was chasing me for a debt, which I was disputing. I'm probably wrong, legally, but he's gone off to consider the matter again.