One digit wrong in a sort code . . . and goodbye to £2,000
Ms L.S. writes: I sent £2,000 from my Lloyds account to an account at the Royal Bank of Scotland, but I mistyped one digit of the RBS sort code. I realised this the next day and informed Lloyds, and after I contacted the Ombudsman, Lloyds tried to recover my money. However, RBS responded months later, saying the RBS account had been closed since 2015 so it had returned the money to Lloyds.
Despite this, Lloyds says my money is still with RBS. We need this money badly.
THE original mistake was yours, and Lloyds Bank did query the sort code and account number when you made the transfer, but you have spent months since then, trying without success to find out where your £2,000 went. Your own bank, Lloyds, has even paid you £50 twice, after accepting that on two occasions it did not move quickly enough on your behalf, and the Ombudsman approved these payments.
The major stumbling block all along has been RBS’s insistence that you sent your money to an account which no longer existed, so I asked officials at NatWest Group – RBS’s parent company – to take another look at this.
They came back to me with an answer that was just as puzzling, saying they had found a £2,000 payment from you on the date in question, but it had gone through without a hitch.
Meanwhile, adding to an increasingly confused picture, your own bank had been contacted by Yorkshire Water, asking Lloyds to explain an unexpected £2,000 that had popped up in the water company’s account.
This made even less sense when NatWest Group told me the £2,000 had gone to a personal account and not a business account.
And whatever happened to the suggestion that the money had gone to a dead account that was closed in 2015 and that it had been returned to Lloyds?
When I discussed this with you, things became a little clearer. The £2,000 was to help your daughter whose central heating boiler had failed. When the first £2,000 vanished into the banking system, rather than let her down, you paid all over again.
What NatWest Group had found and reported to me was your second payment; the first £2,000 was still missing. And then, out of the blue, Yorkshire Water re-entered the picture and returned the missing £2,000 to your account at Lloyds.
It had been sitting in the water company’s NatWest Group holding account, not allocated to any of its customers because, of course, it had only gone there by accident.
NatWest Group and RBS had been looking in the wrong place, concentrating on the £2,000 that you had successfully transferred, and not on the initial £2,000 that had gone to Yorkshire Water whose account was one digit different.
Reliance on sort codes and account numbers is clearly helpful to the banks, but bad experiences like yours show that making a single slip is as easy as mis-dialling a phone number – but a lot more expensive and far harder to put right.