Banks lost my £350 donation to charity for African orphans

ON SEPTEMBER 27, I attempted to send £349.50 through Nationwide to Standard Chartered Bank in Kampala, Uganda, on behalf of a children’s charity.

Unfortunately, this money never arrived at the bank in Kampala because the charity mistakenly gave me the Swift code of Standard Chartered Bank in London.

Since then, Nationwide has made repeated attempts to request the money be sent back, but nobody is acknowledging they are holding it.

This money was for orphaned children to help pay for rent and food and I find it disgraceful that it has not been returned for several months. Mrs J. C., Cheshire. I seem to be dealing with rather too many complaints recently where money has gone missing between banks, and the customer is being bounced from one to the other.

In this case, as you say, it started when you were supplied with, and then used, the wrong swift code (which identifies individual international banks).

It is complicated because Nationwide is not an international bank and, as such, uses a third party — in this case HsBC — for such payments.

By coincidence, HsBC dealt with standard Chartered Bank in Uganda when it came to converting the money to local currency.

standard Chartered in London received an instruction to transfer the money on september 27, 2016, but discovered there was no money to transfer. Then its Uganda office received a payment on October 14, but this did not contain the details needed for it to reach an account, so the money was returned to HsBC on October 18.

standard Chartered’s subsidiaries operate on an independent basis, so the Uganda office would not have known about the payment instruction received by the London bank.

meanwhile, its London office had treated the payment as cancelled as it hadn’t received the funds.

Here the story becomes somewhat vague, but standard Chartered is adamant it sent the money straight back and has the paperwork to support this. so, somewhere along the line, your money went into limbo and only emerged when it was eventually returned to Nationwide on January 26.

You might ask why this letter is only appearing now. Well, I have been trying to get to the bottom of where the money was.

Nationwide says: ‘As soon as our member made us aware of the issue, the third party acted to trace the funds. However, Nationwide is reliant on them to liaise with the intermediary banks. Unfortunately, there was a delay in recalling the funds.’

The good news is that Nationwide is offering you £100 compensation, which I suspect you will use to boost the charity donation. standard Chartered says it is satisfied it acted correctly and promptly throughout. I ORDERED tickets from Viagogo to see Porto vs Benfica on November 6. I confirmed that we needed the tickets by November 3 as we had to fly to the match in Portugal. But they were not delivered until November 4, by which time my two friends and I were airborne. In addition, they were delivered to a neighbour’s house by mistake. My wife tried to forward them and eventually provided the ticket details, but we were unable to convince the Porto ticket office to let us in.

We had to resort to touts to attend the football game. In all, including the €180 (£153) we paid Viagogo for the tickets, we spent €368 (£313) on the game.

We have contacted Viagogo asking for an explanation and compensation, but have heard nothing. K. B., Gloucestershire. VIAgOgO is a ticket resale website — and you don’t have to search very deeply on the internet to find scores of complaints.

But I like to give every firm a chance to resolve a problem and present its side of the story. As such, I have tried to extract a response out of Viagogo time and again. Yet it has made no attempt to sort out this issue. Nor has it given me any explanation.

I received a single email reply on February 2, at 5.38pm, from somebody called Caroline green, who, according to her LinkedIn profile, has for the past three years worked in online reputation management. It said: ‘Hi Tony, Thanks for sending this over. This will be reviewed AsAP. Kind regards, Caroline.’

since then, I have emailed on numerous occasions and heard nothing. my phone attempts to get to someone who might speak to the Press and help to resolve your problem have got nowhere.

so I am printing your letter in the hope that someone — anyone — from Viagogo makes contact with me. I would be delighted to publish any response Viagogo has to your complaint.

But all I can confirm is that your tickets were delivered late and to the wrong address, you are several hundred pounds out of pocket — and Viagogo doesn’t seem bothered.