My bank is rubbish!

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A couple of weeks ago I made an online donation to a charity appeal. Somehow my details were intercepted by fraudsters who (I later found) attempted to make a series of further payments to some online gambling company I had never heard of, based in Malta, which was carried out within six minutes of me making that donation. Luckily my bank flagged up those transactions, but what they did next was so useless as to be laughable. And at the end of it all they sent me one of those ‘You have recently had some contact with us, would you recommend our service’ emails. Well you can probably imagine I told them I definitely wouldn’t and they really needed to get their act together as the fraudsters did a far better and more convincing job than the actual bank! Luckily I don’t seem to have experienced any long-term effects and everything is now back to normal. The whole experience is explained below if anyone wants to know the details; this is what I wrote in response to the bank’s request for feedback. _________________________________________________________ Definitely not recommended and I'm considering leaving even though this bank is my main account which I have had since 1985! At that time there were four branches in my home city centre as well as five others nearby. Now only one of those is left and the staff there do their best to try to get you to do everything by machine and when you do get to speak to a real person they don't seem to know anything about anything! I received a text message seemingly from my bank telling me to expect a message from a number 60407, and that message told me some transactions on my card had been declined, and if I didn't recognise them I should reply N. I started to do that, but when I clicked 'send' it said I would be charged - this seemed very odd for reporting fraud to your bank! So I didn't send it, instead I waited until the next day when I could go to the branch in person, in the hope that staff actually in the branch are likely to be genuine bank employees and not fraudsters. In the meantime I received a couple of telephone calls from a number which was flagged up as probable spam, so I didn't answer, and I received voicemail messages from a recorded voice or AI voice saying 'against fraud, press any key' (this was the complete message). This was so unconvincing that I could not believe they were genuine, and nor could any of my family. When I did get to see a member of staff at the bank I showed her the texts and played her the voicemail messages. She didn't believe any of these messages were genuine either, and thought someone must have somehow sent them purportedly from the bank number. She stopped my debit card but said she couldn't log the transactions as fraud because they were still pending. Eventually she did also think of ordering me a replacement card! After this visit I still continued to receive the 'spam' calls and messages, until eventually I received a call from a different number and a message from what sounded like a real person saying it was important I contacted the bank. So I then called using the number on my debit card, as we are advised. I spoke to a member of the fraud team and explained what had happened. He told me that all the text messages and calls I had received were, in fact, genuine but that bank staff don't know about this system! I was still wary when he asked me to confirm various details, so he tried to convince me he was genuine by listing my recent transactions. However I have definitely heard of a case where fraudsters did exactly the same so that just made the whole thing seem even more suspicious (and yes I know I had called the number - but nowadays how do you know that the calls haven't somehow been diverted to someone else?) So then I just had to wait a few days until I could access my online account again (with new card) so I could see whether the transactions were declined or not or whether my details had been compromised. My biggest complaint (apart from the difficulty of actually finding a branch these days) is that the behaviour of the bank when fraud was suspected, was to do EXACTLY what we have repeatedly been warned fraudsters are likely to do, i.e. tell you your account has been subject to a fraudulent transaction then call you and ask you to 'confirm' your details. In fact any half-competent fraudster could probably do a more convincing job of it than the bank itself, which is why they are so successful. The bank should really pull their socks up and do a better job because millions of pounds are lost to fraud every year and as a shareholder as well as a customer I would like to see the situation greatly improved! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.