Could – and should – Nationwide have done more to help poor Sally Donaldson get her £26,000 back?
This is a tricky case, one of the most astonishing we’ve investigated in the past few years. While many will sympathise, the stumbling block for a lot of people is: how did she and her partner fail to notice a missing £1,000 every month … for almost two-and-a-half years? (They’re not loaded by any means.)
Of course that weakens their case, but it’s important to remember that Laura, the recipient, would have known full well that the money wasn’t hers (she certainly isn’t loaded either). Yet she took it and spent it.
No one is entitled to keep money wrongly credited to their account. Yet when Nationwide wrote to Laura requesting that she repay the money, and she replied that she no longer had it and sent the building society away with a flea in its ear, it seems to have meekly accepted that and washed its hands of the matter.
There’s no evidence Nationwide did anything to check Laura’s claim that she definitely wasn’t in a position to repay the money. Did they grill her about what she spent it on or whether she had moved it somewhere else?
Perhaps the society could have set up a repayment plan or loan, so Laura could pay the money back in instalments. Failing that, Nationwide could at least have put one of its legal experts at Sally’s disposal (she and her partner have been with the society for more than 20 years). Or perhaps it should have got tough with Laura and called in the police as soon as it was alerted to the “theft” of a five-figure sum of money?
It’s interesting to note that Nationwide recently changed its T&Cs relating to money sent to the wrong account. It says that provided there is proof, it is able to go into an account and take back cash – assuming the money is still in there. First Direct has also amended its rules and gone further: it has indicated it will claw back the money in such cases, even if this results in the recipient going overdrawn.
Nationwide’s firm view is that this was entirely Sally’s error, and the society isn’t prepared to take on the debt or put itself at risk of financial loss when the mistake wasn’t of its making. That feels like quite a tough line to take.
Maybe I’m a Luddite, but for me this case is a big advert for staying with paper bank statements. Sally’s original mistake coincided with her and her partner switching to paperless statements. I’d be worried that if I opted to get an email telling me my statement was ready to view online, I’d rarely get round to actually looking at it – thereby increasing the chance that any fraud or blunders would go undetected.
