Santander immoral and hardship

[Goatan]

Hi fellow caggers I have recently had problems with santanders customer "service" thought i would post a copy of my copmlaint here as warning against usign this failure of a bank.

 

wish to complain about your lack of customer service. Your debt department has placed a block on my card. I cleared this debt on 29th yet the card remained blocked I tried to contact someone to get this fixed. The first person I spoke to told a complete lie and said it was impossible and I would need a new card. I have been in this situation once before and knew that to be wrong so I hung up and rang again hoping to get someone who knew what they were doing, the second time I did. They put me through to the card department who said the block was placed by the debt department who won’t be back in until Tuesday. This has caused be great inconvenience and means I will not be able to travel to a family reunion tomorrow. To add insult to injury I have been getting harassing automated telephone calls all weekend from the debt department when I have already paid!! Why can other departments be in to help over the weekend when the debt department can’t be bothered and instead get robots to do their job for them? If they have the authority to block cards potentially causing people significant problems they should then have the responsibility be contactable like the card department. I have never known such insulting, incompetent and downright inhuman customer service from a bank. I will be copying this complaint to various financial publications this is something i have never felt compelled to do in any dealing with any other business.

[Goatan]

I lost my job in February and went a bit over on my account and had a few charges nothing to serious a few pounds interest a month applied over a couple of months recently a family member helped to clear my over draft and all the pending fees at the time two weeks ago. I look at my account today as I want a statement and suddenly there is a daily fee charge for £85 its almost as if I had a bit of money go in and they decide to take it for themselves. Can anyone advice if this is even legal and how I go about claiming hardship. Santander really are the worst bunch of vultures it feels they are doing this deliberately to push me into the red again so they milk me for more money, Utterly immoral.

[maroondevo52]

Hi,

 

I know where your coming from, send them a letter of complaint and ask them to refund the latest charges as you are suffering financil difficulties, I did this about a month ago and they refunded £150 into my account they also promised not to apply any more charges until after the 18th of this month.

 

I did have more charges to come off but checked today and they have stuck to their promise and not taken the charges. They charge a £5 a day for being overdrawn.

 

It's always worth a punt, as they may play ball, stranger things have happened.

 

Good luck with that.

 

Regards.

 

Scott.

[Goatan]

Thanks for that one of the things i want to now is where the charges came from as they where applied after the overdraft and pending charges where cleared. Very odd as they havent applied a daily charge in the past until i paid the overdraft off.

[maroondevo52]

They have hit me with the daily charge a few times, think it comes out on the 10th of the following month, this is the address for the complaint.

 

Complaints

Santander

PO Box 1125

Bradford

BD1 9PG.

[Goatan]

thats great.

[Goatan]

This adraft of the copmlaint letter i intend to make to santander, Any comments welcomed

 

I wish to complain about the actions you have taken on my account. I February i was made redundant, and went overdrawn you charged me a monthly interest fee as well. I recently had a family member help me out to clear this Overdraft. After it was cleared you slapped on new daily charges of£85 that had not been applied before and seem rather arbitrary. It seems that as soon as there was some money in the account you made new additional charges that will deliberately push the account back into being overdrawn creating more money for Santander. I am still unemployed and this will continue to add up. Be assured that I will never bank with Santander again and will never transfer any more money to you. The debt was cleared and was even in a little bit of credit. Also be assured that if you fail to remove this arbitrary and seemingly made up charge that was suspiciously applied after the overdraft was paid I will be making an official complaint to the financial ombudsman services

[maroondevo52]

You should include the words Financial and Hardship in the letter, also I'm not too sure you need to tell them you will never use there services again, you know what folk can be like.

[Goatan]

well if i end it like this "i am still unemployed and this will continue to add up causing me financial hardship." and drop the more agressive ending.

[maroondevo52]

Thats sound, is it an old Allience & Leicester Current Account ?

[Goatan]

Yes they used to be a good bank until santander took over.

[maroondevo52]

Just wondered, mines is a old A & L Account, I was surprised they refunded me any charges, all they would refund was one months worth, I also asked them for a small overdraft but they knocked me back saying If I ask again in three months time they may give me one, aye right, and pigs might fly.

[Goatan]

yes i tried the overdraft route as well altough they said 6 months for me. when they where still a&l long before they wher etaken over i was in a similer situation altough was only out of work for a month as soon as i mentioned that they reversed everything! i miss a&l

[richardtj]

We've found the house of our dreams. Now before I go into detail, lets set the ground rules:

 

Seller agreed £245,000 for the property

Deposit £80,000 (with £60,000 from Grandmum)- 35% deposit

Run our own business. Combined monthly income £3600.00 (net, not gross)- ie after tax and NI. No outstanding debts. Gran has loan of £12,000 with monthly repayments of £240.00 and due further lump sum of £80,000 from sale of own house, which will clear the loan and leave her with plenty of cash.

 

So, this house is for Wife, Husband and Grandmother. There's a wonderful granny annex to the property. Property passed the Mortgage survey with flying colours. Santander Abbey to offer £165,000 in prinicpal.

 

That's where it went completely awry and left us thinking long and hard about moving our business accounts away from Santander....

 

From the outset, our IFA made it perfectly clear that the three of us would be living in the property and that 80% of the desposit would come from Gran. We have an email thread to that effect, clearly stating these points.

 

So, the issues started when Abbey Santander came back to us stating that they could not lend against the property because it had 2 kitchens?!?!?! I kid you not..... it has 2 kitchens. Their exact words were we would sub-let the property!!!! We tell them again that gran would be living in the annex.

 

We then receive correspondance to the effect that we could not proceed unless gran goes on the mortgage, she could not gift us the deposit and live there as well. Fine, not a problem. It'll have to be a 14 year mortgage to complete before she turned 75 with monthly repayments of £1350 by our reckoning at a fixed rate of 4%- not bad really... this after being told that we'd be fine on a 25 year mortgage without gran (we'd clearly identified the fact that she'd be living in the granny annex and gifting us 80% of the deposit).

 

A sickening tale of Santander Abbey:

 

Oh and to rub salt into the wound, on the day we recieved the call from our solicitors telling us all this, a mortgage contract for 25 years arrived from Santander Abbey for the full £165,000 for just myself and my wife to sign........ At that point, I decided my 3 year old son could probably run Santander Abbey better and wondered whether this Bank was in a slow steady decline (is Santander going to be the next failed Bank due to more incompetence?).

 

So, we go back through our IFA, telling Abbey Santander that a 14 year mortgage would be our preferred choice. We proceed to contact Abbey Santander's internal Complaints dept and the Chief Executive, both of whom were nice..... The Complaints Dept started to deal directly with our IFA to get us the mortgage and stonewalled us again and again. The response again and again was that it was with the underwriters. Our IFA was finally told last Friday that the decission would be available yesterday (Tuesday). He contacted them yesterday and guess what..... the person he was dealing with was not available....... all day...... Then today, Abbey Santander contact our solicitors to let them know that they're no longer dealing with us.

 

So, here's my recommendation... If you're UK based, Go with a British Bank, who abilde by UK regulations and forget about any bank based outside the UK.... it's not in your best interest.

[Cadbury1879]

Had my usual yearly Santander credit card statment, with the usual 3k balance, no interest.I have made no payments following a dispute in 2007

No debt collection activites.

At the same time my CRA report arrived. Satisfied account closed 2008

There incompetence has perhaps worked in my favour??

I'll expect the same statement now for the rest of my I assume!!!

[dadtaxi]

Me and my Brother was Executer for my fathers estate, which included over 30,000 in various savings, accounts and investments with Santander. I wont go into details of all the incompatent hassles he got put through as I could write a small novel. However a couple of highlights was a Abbey Department who wrote back to us stating that they could only deal with the account holder (WTF -do you understand the term 'Executer' and all that implies?). Also another counter staff member who made us return three times with copies of the Death Certificate.. Turned it the part of the computer screen which shows Death Certificate Received was below the bottom of the display, and each time he looked he didnt know that he had to SCROLL DOWN. Anyway they were so useess we put in a Formal Complaint. After a while we had to put in another Formal Complaint as they hadnt been following their own complaint proceedure. Once again we then put in another Formal Complaint that even that second complaint was not being handled correctly (again). We took great pleasure in going to that branch and demanding to close all accounts at once and a Cheque to walk out the door. Even that they tried to stiff us by pretending various Abbey proceedures/Banking regulations/handling charges to delay us by several weeks. Dont ever assume Abbey cares about you as a valued customer. In their eyes you're a walking wallet