Friday, March 29

Bank Accidentally Gives Very Expensive Christmas Gift: 130 Million Pounds Transferred Incorrectly

The Santander bank in London accidentally overpaid 130 million pounds to a total of 75,000 accounts of individuals and companies. In addition, the bank accidentally paid a second premium from the accounts of a total of 2,000 companies, according to the British newspaper The Times.

 

“The duplicate payments were the result of a scheduling problem, which we quickly identified and resolved,” a bank spokeswoman told The Times. The money went to employees of the companies and their suppliers.

The bank is now doing everything it can to get the money back and is in talks with the banks of the account holders who received a double payment. These include Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank, and Virgin Money customers. The error affected the company accounts, and the extra money came from Santander’s own reserves.

Pay UK, the operator of major payment systems in the UK, also talks to banks about how to reverse payments. Some of the money has already been recovered, but one of the banks said, according to The Times, that it would be reluctant to withdraw the money from an account if it would cause the account to go into the red.

It is already the third technical problem at Santander in the UK in a year and a half. In May, several customers were unable to make payments for a day due to a computer problem. In August 2020, thousands of customers were unable to use internet banking for a while. As part of the Spanish Santander group, Santander has 14 million active customers and 20,000 employees in the United Kingdom.

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