Barclays fails again after scammers ransack account

Another day, another spot of bother for Barclays after claims that fraudsters can easily contact the bank, pose as a customer, ask for that person’s account address to be changed, then take out huge loans against their name.
The claim follows the experience of Nottingham woman Jude Grundy, who was just days away from moving home when her debit card was refused at a supermarket checkout.
It later emerged that two weeks previously fraudsters had called Barclays, claimed to be her, and changed her address. They were then able to open a second linked account and apply for a new debit card.
With that card the crooks were then able to obtain a £24,000 loan from Barclays and a £750 overdraft, as well as stealing £4,000 in savings from her and her husband. She only found out about the account when she spotted that £2,000 had been transferred into her account. It was this which the bank’s systems blocked as suspicious.
Only after Guardian Money intervened was her account unfrozen, which was when Grundy discovered that the £24,000 loan had been taken out and her savings were gone.
She told the newspaper: “When I was finally able to log on I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I had been told the account was up and running again, but no one appears to have noticed it had been ransacked.”
Not only did it hand control over her account to fraudsters, it then closed it, leaving all her usual direct debits unpaid. “The staff who decided to freeze the account in the first place had not noticed any of this suspicious activity, it seems. They were happy to just pass it back to me,” Grundy said.
“The whole thing has been unbelievable, shockingly bad, and I never want to hear their ‘on-hold’ music ever again.” Barclays has now agreed to pay the couple £1,000 in compensation.
Last week, it emerged that Barclays had been constantly mailing credit card applications to a man who has never been alive, despite numerous attempts to get the finance firm to stop.

TOPICS:Barclays fraud