Reclaim Barclays Bank Charges

[Mrgreengenes]

I've got my court date now, beginning of Feb.

 

I need to sort out my court bundle by the middle of December. Would someone please point me in the right direction on how to do this. I have seen info on other posts previously, but it would take me ages to find it again.

 

Your help is always very much appreciated.

 

By the way, my new Nikki Avatar expresses perfectly what I think of Banks and their charging policy.

[Mrgreengenes]

Silly me, I should have checked the templates library first. There is the bundle advice written by my favourite Moderator, Bookworm.

[Welshman]

By the way, my new Nikki Avatar expresses perfectly what I think of Banks and their charging policy.

 

You constipated too?

[Mrgreengenes]

My court bundle has now been delivered to the court and the defendant (Barclays). All I have to do now is wait for either the court date or the full settlement offer.

 

I will prepare myself just in case I have to actually appear in court.

 

I'll let y'all know how I get on.

[Mrgreengenes]

Letter just received from Barclays.

 

"As you will have seen from our Defence, we consider that your claim lacks merit and that it will fail. In particular, we disagree with your legal analysis that the charges levied to your account with Barclays amount to penalty clauses and are unfair. We do, however, recognise that the sum at issue betwen us is relatively modest and as such, it is not cost effective for either party to take this matter to trial. Therefore, in order to avoid the inevitable time and cost associated with pursuing the case to trial, we are prepared to settle your claim upon payment of the charges applied to your account, together with statutory interest and costs totalling £****.** subject to the terms set out in this letter."

 

The terms are, full and final settlement, and without any admission of liability. It is interesting to note that there was no mention of a confidentiality clause in the settlement offer. Perhaps they have realised that is now pointless asking for it.

 

In other words,

 

 

***I WON***

I have accepted the offer even though it is approx. £100 short (probably interest calculation) I hope no-one shouts at me for accepting slightly less than the full amount!

 

Of course, the money still has to reach my account. The amount will be disclosed in my next post and on my signature.

 

Thank you to the Consumer Advice Group and the Moderators for all your help in this matter. I wouldn't have done it without you. My donation will follow in due course.

[Welshman]

Excellent news, well done. Send the acceptance letter back and put a line through the confidentiality part. You'll still be paid.

[Mrgreengenes]

£4799.38 has just been credited to my Barclays bank account.

 

Thank you to all who have helped me. I wouldn't have been able to do it without you.

 

5% of my settlement is on it's way to this site in deepest gratitude.

 

Abbey National (my umbrella account) here I come.

[lindylou1974]

Congratulations

 

Did they not close your account in the end then ?

[Mrgreengenes]

Not yet, Lindylou, but I am now about to start another claim for the charges taken since July last year. So they may well get fed up refunding me.

[Mrgreengenes]

 

5% of my settlement is on it's way to this site in deepest gratitude.

 

I have just donated £240 to this forum and nobody said thank you.

[Mrgreengenes]

Bankfodder has apologised for the mistake and I have accepted his apology. This is a great site and without it I would not have been able to claim any money back. Of course I will continue to donate and so should everybody who wins no matter how small. In fact why don't you donate a small amount now to keep the site running?

 

Would a Moderator please move this thread to the litigation concluded section.

[Mrgreengenes]

Would a Moderator please move this thread to the litigation concluded section.

 

Would you please also change the title to read **WON**.

[Mrgreengenes]

Would a Moderator please annotate the title to read **WON** and move this thread to the Litigation concluded section. Thank you.

 

I've asked for this to happen several times.

[anley]

Nice one Green

 

You see everyone (whose slightly scared about the process) HOLD YOUR GROUND DON'T GIVE UP, FOLLOW THE SIMPLE PROCEEDURES ON THIS SITE AND THERE'S A 99% CHANCE YOU'LL GET A RESULT!

 

The only trouble to the above strategy is that it takes time. I did two cases against Barclays/Barclaycard, starting at the beginning of Sep 2006 and got a result by the middle of March - so 6.5 months

[Mrgreengenes]

I have made a purchase today of £7.99 using my Barclays debit card. I checked the balance before and after the transaction. The balance has been reduced by £7.99 exactly. Therefore the money for this transaction has been "ringfenced" for this company and is no longer available to me.

 

If, in the next few days I exceed my overdraft limit before this transaction is completed, I may be charged for this transaction. Surely this is wrong as the money should already have been allocated to this company.

 

I know that if I do not have sufficient funds when I make a transaction to this company, the transaction will fail, therefore, the company check that I have sufficient funds at the time of sale. However, the charge advice letter states that "As these transactions are guaranteed, we've agreed to pay them even though there were insufficient available cleared funds in your account"

 

Surely the advice letter is wrong because had there been insufficient cleared funds available at the time, the transaction would not have gone through.

 

I would appreciate some opinions on this matter before I write to complain to Barclays.

Edited May 31, 2012 by Mrgreengenes
grammar error

[slick132]

Hi MrGG's,

 

What sort of transaction is this, that is guaranteed.

 

[Mrgreengenes]

 

What sort of transaction is this, that is guaranteed.

 

 

Sorry, I don't understand your question. I made a simple online transaction which went through. The money is "ringfenced" for when the transaction is finally processed, but if I am overdrawn then, I will get charged. I cannot make this payment if there is insufficient funds but the bank still charges for it.

 

I have also been charged for having made a purchase of £2.99 at KFC. The bank say that I had insufficient funds at the point of sale. This is totally untrue. There would be no transaction if I did have a balance in my account.

 

I have decided to reclaim ALL of my charges for the last 6 years. I have done it successfully before but could someone please push me in the right direction on where to start, as the process is slightly different now.

[slick132]

Even though you may have successfully reclaimed default charges on your current a/c in the past, you will not be able to do so now.

 

After the OFT failed in it's case against the banks a couple of years back, reclaiming current a/c charges became almost impossible.

 

An exception to this may be if you are experiencing Financial Difficulty - http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/content.php?557-Letter-for-an-application-for-consideration-for-hardship

 

Also, if you are treated unfailty by your bank, you can try using BCOBS. See here - http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/announcement.php?f=7&a=220

 

[Mrgreengenes]

Can someone please point me in the right direction on how to start the process of reclaiming unfair bank charges from Barclays.

 

I have done this before as my footer says but the process has changed since then.

 

I have tried looking through your stickies and templates but I soon get lost amongst the massive amount of information there.

 

Please help me someone. Thank you in advance.

[slick132]

Hi Mr GGs,

 

The concept of reclaiming current a/c bank charges as a routine matter is finished.

 

If you have suffered default charges unfairly**, there may be some relief for you using BCOBS, a set of regulations which compel the bank to treat you fairly.

 

Failure of this duty by the bank gives you the right to take direct court action.

 

Can you confirm briefly what charges you've suffered and why you consider them to be unfair, thanks.

 

 

 

 

** As suggested by your other post made last night. This has been removed as your post above is clearer.

[Mrgreengenes]

Hi slick132, thank you for replying,

 

I made several transactions at the end of last month (March).

 

One of them was an online purchase of £5.

 

The largest was for £121.

 

At the time of making these purchases, I had sufficient funds.

But I have just received a charge letter from Barclays saying I had insufficient funds for the £5 transaction.

 

As I suspected that this would happen, I asked Barclays for a list of outstanding transactions in the pipieline which had not hit my account yet.

I received this and the total of these transactions was exactly the same as the difference between my account balance and current cleared balance.

I have a copy of my online account statement showing this.

 

Therefore, for Barclays to apply the charge saying that I had insufficient funds is wrong

because, at the time of purchase,

funds were removed from my account and were no longer available to me.

The amount should have been ring fenced for the company I sent £5 to.

 

Barclays are arguing that,

as I was beyond my overdraft limit a few days later when the company called for the £5, I then had insufficient funds for the transaction.

 

But my argument is that £5 had already been removed from my account.

£5 should have been removed from the holding account and paid.

[slick132]

Hi Mr GG,

 

Not sure I understand your thinking here.

 

If the £5 for the purchase was unavailable to you in anticipation of the money being paid to the vendor, how does that affect you going beyond your OD limit a few days later.

 

Surely you would end up being charged one way or the other because you went beyond your OD limit.

 

[Mrgreengenes]

Barclays do not charge for exceeding the overdraft limit.

 

An unexpected amount was taken from my account.

Something that I had agreed.

This amount is taken once a year.

Unfortunately, I forgot about it.

This is what took me over my overdraft limit.

I suspected that I may have gone over as it was the beginning of the month and it was also over the Bank Holiday weekend.

 

The point I am making is that funds were allocated to the vendor at the time of purchase negating their statement that I had insufficient funds.

If I had insufficient funds at the time of purchase the transaction would have failed.

[Mrgreengenes]

I am disappointed that a member of the site team has asked me a question and not replied to my answer.

 

Not the response I have come to expect from this excellent, helpful site.

 

I feel that Barclays are treating hundreds of their customers unfairly and I would like to complain in the strongest possible way

and achieve some kind of success for all customers.

 

Not just in this individual case.

 

This has happened to me before and will keep on happening until some action is taken against them.

 

Slick 132, if you are not willing to help me out surely there must be someone else who will.

Edited April 25, 2013 by Mrgreengenes
spelling mistake

[slick132]

Hi MrG,

 

I have to admit to simply not understanding your complaint and thought others might choose to comment.

 

If you exceed your o/d limit, would they not charge you a Personal Reserve Usage fee, or did you opt out of the Reserve system.

 

Even if you opted out of the Reserve system, wouldn't you be hit for exceeding the o/d limit with the other transaction.

 

In any event, even if I don't understand the situation, I mentioned BCOBS in post #2 above. Click on the word "BCOBS" and you'll get further info on using BCOBS to complain to the bank.

 

I'll ask other Site Team to look in, in case I'm just being thick and missing the blindingly obvious.