Wrong sort code? The DPS needs to SORT out its act . . .

J.C. writes: Deposit protection schemes are backed by the Government and are supposed to protect tenants from rogue landlords. However, more than three months after leaving a property, I am still waiting to get my deposit back from the Deposit Protection Service in Bristol, which is run by Computershare Investor Services.

WHEN you pressed the Deposit Protection Service to return the £1,425 you were owed, staff at the Bristol company claimed you had entered the wrong information on your request for the return of your money.

You have told me that you believe that instead of sending the money to your account with First Direct, they mistakenly tried to send it to First Direct’s parent bank, HSBC.

When you tried to trace the missing money, you found that the account DPS said it paid simply does not exist. And after lots of trying, DPS had been unable to find your money, leaving you seriously out of pocket.

At the heart of this lies DPS’s claim that you gave them the wrong bank sort code number.

On the other hand, you say you would hardly know the sort code number from memory, so would have had your bank card in front of you when you typed in the details of where DPS should send your money. What DPS has admitted is that when you rang up and asked about the delay in paying you, DPS staff told you it was up to you to contact your own bank and ‘request they return the funds’ – though, of course, your bank had never received the funds and knew nothing about the missing payment. DPS sent you £25 as an apology for this.

This was frustrating enough, but there was a glimmer of hope in an email from DPS which told you: ‘The bank has replied and has completed a payment recovery form to retrieve the funds and send back to us. This can take up to 36 days.’

But this glimmer was extinguished five days later, when another email from DPS made no mention of it and told you that no further DPS errors had been found.

I asked officials at DPS to investigate, and they have insisted that you gave them a sort code which was not even one used by your own bank, so the payment went completely wrong.

They say that the bank which received the money accepted it but could not credit it to any account.

When you contacted DPS, it took almost three months to trace the money and recover it. You have now received £1,419, which is £6 short of what you expected, but you decided not to make a fuss about this.

You have told me: ‘I will maintain until my last breath that if I am putting bank details in, I have the card in front of me. I might understand if there were digits reversed – but a completely wrong sort code for a completely different bank? In hindsight, I should have taken a screen shot.’ Good advice!