Is this Santander account active?

I paid £104 for a subscription for some foreign television channels, a service I have used over the years. It used to give the option of paying by credit card. This time, however, it wanted the money by bank transfer or cheque. I chose bank transfer when I noticed the account was with Santander, which I have banked with since 1986.

I then waited, but nothing materialised. I tried telephoning the seller, without success.

I then contacted Santander but it refused point blank to even consider my request as I had voluntarily authorised the bank transfer.

At this time I was only trying to establish whether the account I paid into is still active, but Santander would not give me details, citing data protection.

Later it agreed to investigate. Then it said it would not recover the money but it still would not confirm whether the account was

active. It also advised me to report this to Action Fraud, which I did. AP, MIDDLESEX

At the beginning, Santander had said that it could not do anything for you, but it quickly realised that this was incorrect.

The adviser called you back five minutes later to apologise and transferred you through to its security team to raise a claim.

On review, it has now offered you £50 for any confusion that this may have caused. It says its security team immediately tried to recover the money from the beneficiary account but “all funds had been removed prior to [ your reader] making us aware of the scam.”

You, though, are familiar with the service and have received what you paid for when you subscribed in the past, so you don’t think this is a scam.

Santander adds that, as you willingly made the payment online and entered your one-time passcode, the decision remains to decline the case.

Paying with a card, had you been able to, would have offered certain safeguards that cash and transfers cannot.