Barclays – utter *****

In the post today to the ***** at Barclays:

Dear customer service people,

With immediate effect can you please close the above listed account. Since opening it, Barclays have proven themselves to be the most pathetic, useless, unreliable, mistake-ridden excuse for a banking organisation I have ever had the severe misfortune to deal with. In fact, I’m rather loathe to use the word “organisation” simply as it implies an ability to organise – something it’s been categorically demonstrated that your business lacks.

When I first signed up for the account, I was sent a letter telling me what items to expect in the post. Among these were a debit/cash card and a PIN. After two weeks, these had not arrived and obviously I was somewhat worried as I’d transferred £1000 into the account and didn’t want someone else withdrawing the cash. I called your help centre and was told to contact the branch I’d signed up with. This was rather difficult as I’d signed up online – something I thought would have been on my record. I was then told that the account I’d signed up for didn’t include a cashcard so I shouldn’t have been expecting one. Great start.

After a while, I deposited another £1000 and was shortly expecting the £100 “incentive” to be credited to my account. It never was, at least not until I chased this matter. At which point it was credited twice and then one of these debited again. It was during this fiasco that I realised that despite two requests to do so, you’d failed to change my home address when I moved from Bradford to Perth. I was awaiting a letter which had arrived some 300+ miles away to an empty house.

I am currently on an extended holiday and needed quick access to the money in the account. As you’d not seen fit to provide me with a debit card, I had to move the money electronically to another account. At this point, your online banking software decided to lock me out. I could only apply for new login details by providing my cashcard number. Which you’d not seen fit to give me. The only phone number given to contact online banking is a local rate number which cannot be called from outside the UK so I had to ask my mother to contact you on my behalf. All this succeeded in doing was getting me sent another arsey letter telling me I shouldn’t have given her my online banking details. If you’d actually thought about the people who use online banking (i.e. Those who travel) you may have given provision for people to contact you when they had problems with it.

After digging through the huge list of contact numbers online I found one number I could call – the number for lost credit cards. I rang that – though I could not reverse the charges as I was in Vietnam at the time. Non-Vietnamese citizens cannot legally make reverse-charge calls out of the country. The call got me passed through to Barclays banking staff and then got me exactly nowhere (what a surprise) and I was left with £2100 in a bank account which I couldn’t access. The staff were utterly unhelpful, simply asking me for a telephone banking password which I didn’t have as I had never signed up for it, choosing to rely on the internet banking.

The only way to re-enable everything was to get a new internet banking code and/or a telephone banking passcode. These would be sent to my home address. Which you still had listed as Bradford and refused to change without me providing a telephone banking passcode that I didn’t have. Can we spot the problem here? Don’t forget that I had on two previous occasions asked for my address to be changed, and had been told by one gentleman on the phone before I left the UK that this had indeed been done.

By this time I was in New Zealand, and made another two telephone calls to try and straighten this out. I was eventually told that to change my address I would have to send a written letter. As a bonus, I could ask for my cash to be transferred on the same letter and this would be done. I duly sent this letter and waited. And waited. And waited.

After 3 weeks, I called Barclays again (at huge expense) and they confirmed that my address had been changed, but that they had no record of any transfer of funds being requested. I instead organised a transfer out of a savings account as I was desperate for money. As a result, I lost interest on these savings. On the same day as the money arrived from my savings account, the funds I’d requested moved by yourselves arrived in my Lloyds account. In other words, the transfer request had been received, acted on and yet nobody at your end knew a damn thing about it.

In total, I reckon I’m upwards of £50 out of pocket in lost interest, international phone calls and airmail as a result of dealing with your completely amateur “bank”. My mother’s been run ragged trying to contact you from the UK and been stonewalled everywhere despite having complete Power of Attorney over all my financial matters – something I was told would take up to a month to register with yourselves and involve two personal visits to a Barclays branch – a 60 mile round trip each time.

Frankly in future, I’d feel safer shoving ten pound notes in a shoe box and carrying it around with me. I simply cannot put into words how utterly dreadful I feel you have been in dealing with the simplest things. Your lack of forethought for potential problems is staggering, your uncaring attitude to a customer with problems belies belief and your inability to perform the simplest of tasks such as change an address… well, words fail me.

I would not hesitate to recommend your company as a bank to anyone I truly loathed and who I’d like to see tearing their hair out. I’d certainly not recommend you to friends – I’d like to keep them. A complete record of my problems and your failure to get anything done about them has been published on the internet. Do a search for “Worst company ever” or “still *****” and “Barclays” and you should find it.

Best of luck finding more gullible fools to fill your coffers. If there was any justice in the world you’d go broke before the end of the financial year and spare any future customers the misery and panic I’ve gone through in the last few months.

Yours in utter disgust,

etc.